Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/561

Rh perhaps it is just as well that none was attempted, for it is greatly to be feared that none is possible. It is worth instancing, however, as exhibiting the sanctimonious pomp and official carelessness of the author's style of writing and thinking.

But our next quotation is more interesting still: "Take compulsory education. The compulsion is a power which gradually lifts [a] people above its own ethical plain "(sic).

I confess that this last sentence reminded me of certain Canadian rustics who were gulled into believing that a man could lift himself into the air by pulling at his boot-straps. The parallelism is perfect, and in each case the implied denial of the persistence of force seems altogether naïve and unconscious. This passage is especially worth instancing, because it shows the weak point in all Mr. Ely's socialistic ideas. His constant assumption is, that governments can coerce the people—can expend force upon them—without itself being supplied with force by the people. The Government (if written with a capital letter) can support the people," whether the people "support the Government" or not. Now, everybody knows the fact to be, that no machine requires so much "pressure" to keep it going as a government agency. Public clamor has to reach a very high key before great measures are passed; endless log-rolling has to be resorted to before the best claim can be passed upon, or the bill most obviously good be enacted. And probably it is fortunate that this is so, for otherwise we should be even more inundated than at present with foolish legislation. But the point for our present notice is, that our Legislatures and executive agencies are inefficient machines requiring a vast amount of power for a given product, and that, too, of poor quality. This is not an accident, but is necessarily so. Legislative and executive bodies are unevolved in character, unspecialized by long discipline for the work they have to do; and this must continue to be so. And Mr. Ely ignores the commonest facts of daily experience as well as the highest generalization of science in the above quotation and in his whole theory of society, so far as he can be said to have one.

Were it worth while, we might continue quotations of this character ad nauseam." Let us remember," he says, in the same Introduction, "that every hope of a permanent reform in industrial and social life must be illusory unless it has a firm foundation in a lasting state reformation." Let the reader observe the connotation of the terms "industrial and social." Does this mean that Congress is to give a "foundation" (whatever that may signify) for every social and industrial improvement? Congress, which can not even manage the tariff or the currency? In Mr. Ely's papers on railroads lately published in "Harper's," it appears that the State (with the big S) is to "reform" that branch of industry. But discussion is useless. Mr. Ely's expressions are so loose, and his papers ignore the commonest facts to such an extent, that argument is impossible.