Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/483

Rh everything is permitted it, and vaunts itself on subjecting everything. It wants to be all, and its will is changing, violent, and weak by turns, like the passionate majorities and the ignorant crowds whence it emanates; and so slight is our confidence in the state that its mobility reassures us more than it scares us.

Yes, we distrust the state, whatever its name or shape; we distrust its prudence, its lights, its doctrines, and its aims; its processes, its methods, its propensity to regulate, its obstructiveness, and its self-conceit; its morality, its conscience, and its probity. It worries us to see in it the organ of right and the instrument of justice. We can not arm the state with new rights or fortify its power on one side without re-enforcing it on all sides. The domain of public authority can not be extended over all interests and private contracts without enslaving the individual and subjecting the family to it. No artifice of political science can find means to make the state the master of economical life, the omnipotent arbiter of the mill and the shop, without our societies that live by work being taken wholly into its hand. There is only one way to establish forever the despotism of the state in the world, but there is one, and it is this.

Even if the modern state should become more equitable and more enlightened; if it should become really something else than an irresponsible collectivity exercising power by changing and passionate proxies; if it should put away its sectarian spirit and its tyrannical processes—we should still doubt its competence and its capacity to regulate the mill and the shop. The state is a weighty engine, with slow-running machinery uselessly complicated, which exacts a considerable expenditure of fuel and manual labor for the least work. No other instrument makes a feebler return and wastes so much force. Consequently, the more we extend the action of the state the more we risk impoverishing the country. Instead of hastening the development of national wealth, the state is calculated to hinder it by restraining the free factors of capital and labor. It is always a reproach which its intervention can not escape, and a very grave one in social and economical matters, that the meddling of public authority unnerves private initiative. This of itself would be a cause of uneasiness, for private initiative has always been the main-spring of progress; to break it or paralyze it by enveloping it with laws and regulations which would arrest or restrict its play would be to fetter the progress of industry and of wealth, and to delay the improvement of the condition of the masses. Further than this, in social questions themselves—questions belonging to the workmen—the intervention of the state, with its vexatious processes and its annoying habits, would generally simply end in depressing instead of stimulating private forces and living energies, humanitarian philanthropy and