Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/480

464 believe that, whether we be Catholic or heterodox, we must be for one or the other; that there can be no middle ground. But as a Catholic, Albert de Mun, has remarked, nothing so quickly leads to inexactness as the passion for arranging men and doctrines in separate groups and designating them by special terms. Such a classification would be especially fallacious in this case; for I do not know of any persons who utterly reject the intervention of the state. In one sense everybody is an interventionist, for we all agree with Leo and the theologians that it is the state's duty to protect the rights of every one, and that the repression of abuses belongs to it. But where does the function of protecting individuals which devolves upon the state begin, where does it end, over what does it extend? We do not all form the same conception of the attributes of the public power. This divergence is more important to our society than the contests of republicans and monarchists or the quarrels of opportunists and radicals. This, and not fastidious controversies on forms of government or the validity of constitutions, constitutes the vital question for modern nations.

The doctrine of laissez-faire, or let alone, has lately enjoyed in some states an authority which it does not deserve. It was once a device of freedom, but it was a negative device, and neither science nor society can rest wholly on a negation. Those who have tried to refer all economical science to it have only succeeded in discrediting political economy and economists. The let-alone, applied where it does not belong—to the work of children and girls in the shop or the mine, for example—becomes inhuman and murderous, and, as it were, the accomplice of the criminal exploitation of misery and vice. Hence it has gone into disfavor; and, as often happens to our human weakness, which straightens itself on one side only to lean over on the other, the inevitable reaction against the famous maxim of Gournay has passed just bounds.

This phrase was applied by those who invented it to industry, commerce, and labor. In demanding the let-alone, Gournay and the economists of the eighteenth century claimed for every Frenchman the right to make, sell, buy, and carry agricultural and industrial products freely. The demand was a protest against the minute and ruinous regulations of the old régime, against the pretension to hold in leading-strings everything in the kingdom that lived by labor. In this sense the laissez-faire is eternally true. Of all the phrases pronounced in France, it was one of those which resounded the farthest—the one, perhaps, that has put French words upon the largest number of human lips. The brief maxim, of which few know the author, has made the tour of the globe, and has contributed a good share to the renovation of