Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/180

1681 who can not has no right to go. Of all forms of greed, the greed for free lunches, the desire to get something for nothing, is the most demoralizing, and in the long run most dangerous. The flag of freedom has never floated over a nation of deadheads.

Then, again, education must take the form of real patriotism—of public interest and of civic virtue. If a republic be not wisely managed, it will fail as any other corporation would; it will only succeed as it deserves success.

The problems of government are questions of right and wrong, they can be settled only in one way. They must be settled right. Whatever is settled wrong comes up for settlement again, and this when we least expect it. It comes up under harder conditions, and compound interest is charged on every wrong decision. The slavery question, you remember, was settled over and over again by each generation of compromisers. When they led John Brown to the scaffold his last words were: "You had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement again sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose of me now very easily," he said; "I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet."

This, John Brown said, and they settled the problem for the time by hanging him. But the question rose again. It was never settled until at last it was "blown hellward from the cannon's mouth." Then it was found that for every drop of negro blood drawn by the lash, a thousand drops of Saxon blood had been drawn by the sword.

Thus it is with every national question, large or small. Thus it will be with the tariff, with finance, with the civil service. Each question must be settled right, and we must pay for its settlement. It is said that fifteen per cent of the laws on the statute books of the States of the Union stand there in defiance of acknowledged laws of social and economic science. Every such statute is blood poison in the body politic. Around every such law will gather a festering sore. Every attempt to heal this sore will be resisted by the full force of the timeservers. Such statutes are steadily increasing in number, concessions by shortsighted legislatures to the arrogant monopolist, the ignorant demagogue, or the reckless agitator. This must stop, "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin," or with ignorance, or with recklessness. "The gods," said Marcus Aurelius, "are at the head of the administration, and will have nothing but the best."