Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/627

Rh is better that they should be gone through once than gone through twice, as they have to be when any relaxation of these conditions permits retrogression.

Thus, that which sundry precepts of the current religion embody—that which ethical systems, intuitive or utilitarian, equally urge, is also that which Biology, generalizing the laws of life at large, dictates. All further requirements are unimportant compared with this primary requirement, that each shall so live as neither to burden others nor to injure others. And all further appliances for influencing the actions and natures of men are unimportant compared with those serving to maintain and increase the conformity to this primary requirement. But, unhappily, legislators and philanthropists, busy with schemes which, instead of aiding adaptation, indirectly hinder it, give little attention to the enforcing and improving of those arrangements by which adaptation is effected.

And here, on behalf of the few who uphold this policy of natural discipline, let me emphatically repudiate the name of laissez-faire as applied to it, and emphatically condemn the counter-policy as involving a laissez-faire of the most vicious kind. While holding that, when the State leaves each citizen to get what good for himself he can, and to suffer what evil he brings on himself, such a let-alone policy is eventually beneficial, I contend that, when the State leaves him to bear the evils inflicted by other citizens, and can be induced to defend him only at a ruinous cost, such a let-alone policy is both immediately and remotely injurious. When a Legislature takes from the worthy the things they have labored for, that it may give to the unworthy the things they have not earned—when cause and consequence, joined in the order of Nature, are thus divorced by statesmen—then may properly come the suggestion, "Cease your interference." But when, in any way, direct or indirect, the unworthy deprive the worthy of their dues, or impede them in the quiet pursuit of their ends, then may properly come the demand, "Interfere promptly and effectually, and be in fact the protectors which you are in name." Our politicians and philanthropists, impatient with a salutary laissez-faire, tolerate and even defend a laissez-faire that is in the highest degree mischievous. Without hesitation, this regulative agency we call the Government takes from us some £100,000 a year to pay for art-teaching and to establish art-museums; while, in guarding us against robbers and murderers, it makes convictions difficult by demurring to the cost of necessary evidence: even the outlay for a plan, admitted by the tax-master, being refused by the Treasury! Is not this a disastrous laissez-faire? While millions are voted without a murmur for an expedition to rescue a meddling consul from a half-savage king, our Executive resists the spending of a few extra thousands to pay more judges: the result being not simply vast arrears and long delays, but immense injustices of other kinds—costs being run up in