Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/354

340 was always the most important point to insist upon. It is to be feared that some thousands of Laidlers will not think so much of it now. So much does it become political philosophers to be careful. Some medicines are also poisons; such medicines should never be issued over the counter to any and every purchaser without a warning label; and this I hope I may say without seeming disrespect for Mr. Herbert Spencer.

To the Editor of "The Times":

I have read with very great interest the "heckling" of Mr. Morley, the letters of Mr. Spencer and of Mr. Greenwood, and your editorial comments on this triangular duel. But, if I may speak in the name of that not inconsiderable number of persons to whom absolute ethics and a priori politics are alike stumbling blocks, permit me, borrowing a phrase which a learned judge has immortalized, to say that "You have not helped us much."

Let me explain the nature of the further help we require by putting a case which is not altogether imaginary:

A score of years ago A. B. bought a piece of land; he paid the price asked by the vender, and all the conditions required by the law were fulfilled in the transference of ownership. The transaction was as much a free contract as if A. B. had gone to market and bought a cabbage. At the time that A. B. handed over his money he believed that the State was a co-partner in the contract, in so far that it undertook to maintain his rights of ownership against everything and everybody who should attempt to invade them, except an act of the Legislature, or the orders of the commanding officer in war-time, or a police officer legally authorized. A. B. has gone on paying his taxes to the State all these years, in full conviction that the State contracted, among other things, to afford him the protection thus defined.

A. B.'s lawyers assured him that the title to the land was perfectly good. This means that, for several centuries at least, neither force nor fraud has intervened, but that the land has passed from owner to owner by free contract. At the same time, A. B., who is somewhat pedantic in the matter of historical accuracy, admits that, for anything he knows to the contrary, in the reign of King John his bit of land may have belonged to Cedric the Saxon; and that possibly the son-in-law of that worthy thane, after the quarrel with Rowena, related by an historian of later date than Scott, may have taken forcible possession of it, and, in virtue of his favor at Court, kept it for himself and his descendants.