Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/42

34 Italian slopes, where less than one fifth attain this moderate height, is sufficient proof. The progressive decline goes on still further as we go south, as our map of Europe has indicated, away down to the toe of Italy's boot. Could demonstration in mathematics he more certain that here in the Tyrol we have a case of an increase of stature due to race alone? One of the most persistent traits of the Teuton is his bodily height. We in America, among the tallest people in the world, owe much of our advantage in this respect to our Teutonic lineage. The rest is due to the high level of prosperity enjoyed by the people in the United States as a whole.



HAVE already shown how modern trade and professional corporations are a reversion to feudal corporations, which were the natural and spontaneous product not of legislative wisdom and philanthropy, but of chronic disorder, and how, for a time, they provided security for despised and plundered toilers, and promoted the growth of civilization. While pointing out the astonishing absurdity involved in the revival of such obsolete institutions in an age devoted almost exclusively to industrial life—a life based upon peace and the largest liberty compatible with justice—I described some of their more flagrant economic evils, the inevitable fruits of their alliance with the state and of their establishment of despotic monopolies. I shall now give an account of some of their moral evils, the fruits also of the same despotism; and though it will, as before, be confined chiefly to the plumbers, because they are the most powerfully organized and the most completely protected, it applies with like fidelity to all other trade and professional corporations sheltered behind a statute or a code of tyrannical rules and regulations.

An optimistic essayist of the National Association of the Master Plumbers may boast that "protection has not only elevated the trade and eliminated from our ranks the incompetent and unworthy," but has "reached out and enhanced man's highest good, and given humanity the greatest benefactions of the age."

He may boast also that in consequence of these noble fruits of protection, "the plumber receives the esteem, respect, and honor