Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/200

190 of doing this, you persist in doing other things. Instead of securing me the bread due to my efforts, you give me a stone—a sculptured block from Ephesus. I am quite content to enjoy only what I get by my own exertions, and to have only that information and those pleasures for which I pay. I am quite content to suffer the evils brought on me by my own defects—believing, indeed, that for me and all there is no other wholesome discipline. But you fail to do what is needed. You are careless about insuring to me the unhindered enjoyment of the benefits my efforts have purchased; and you insist on giving me, at other people's expense, benefits my efforts have not purchased, and on saving me from penalties I deserve."

"You are unreasonable. We are doing our best with the enormous mass of business brought before us: sitting on committees, reading evidence and reports, debating till one or two in the morning. Session after session we work hard at all kinds of measures for the public welfare—devising plans for educating the people; enacting better arrangements for the health of towns; making inquiries into the impurity of rivers; deliberating on plans to diminish drunkenness; prescribing modes of building houses that they may not fall; deputing commissioners to facilitate emigration; and so on. You can go to no place that does not show signs of our activity. Here are public gardens formed by our local lieutenants, the municipal bodies; here are light-houses we have put up to prevent shipwrecks. Everywhere we have appointed inspectors to see that salubrity is maintained; everywhere there are vaccinators to see that due precautions against small-pox are observed; and, if, happening to be in a district where our arrangements are in force, your desires are not well controlled, we do our best to insure you a healthy"—

"Yes, I know what you would say. It is all of a piece with the rest of your policy. "While you fail to protect me against others, you insist on protecting me against myself. And your very failure to do the essential thing results from the absorption of your time in doing nonessential things. Do you think that your beneficences make up for the injustices you let me bear? I do not want these sops and gratuities; but I do want security against trespasses, direct and indirect—security that is real, and not nominal. See the predicament in which I am placed. You forbid me (quite rightly, I admit) to administer justice on my own behalf; and you profess to administer it for me. I may not take summary measures to resist encroachment, to reclaim my own, or to seize that which I bargained to have for my services: you tell me that I must demand your aid to enforce my claim. But demanding your aid commonly brings such frightful evils that I prefer to bear the wrong done me. So that, practically, having forbidden me to defend myself, you fail to defend me. By this my life is vitiated along with the lives of citizens in general. All transactions are impeded; time and labor are lost; the prices of commodities are