Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/46

 38 the right to connect the range he has sold with the water system of his patron's house.

Although this intolerable despotism continues to grow by what it feeds on, and its complete abatement is not likely to come soon, there are not wanting some faint signs of revolt. The hardware men of Buffalo, N. Y., have refused to submit to it, and are engaged in a hot fight against the tyrants of the wrench and soldering iron. As already indicated, the opticians of the State are also in rebellion against the oculists, having discovered in the benevolent legislation of these "social reformers" an attempt to enslave them. "Let us," says the president of the State Optical Society just quoted, summoning his followers to arms and defending his course with an argument equally cogent against all other assaults on personal liberty, "concentrate with the fearless determination to throw off the yoke which some oculists are so determined to have us wear by relegating us to a position of abject dependence upon them, and thus exposing ourselves to the exercise of a power which might, in a moment of emergency, make perjurers of all who lack the fortitude to resist it."

But futile as has been the attempt to create the honest and competent plumber and to make him a national blessing, the effort to find the honest and competent official to enforce legislation and to rescue the public from the dangers of imperfect work has not been less prolific of disappointment. When I say that the failure has been signal and inevitable, I do not express the opinion deduced from first principles nor from every experiment with the black art of the lawmaker since its first dicoverydiscovery [sic]. I express only the honest and unpremeditated convictions that plumbers themselves have reached. Even Mr. Spencer has scarcely described more vividly and effectively the political entanglements, the industrial paralysis, and the moral enervation that follow the practice of this system of modern magic. "It does seem impossible," said a Syracuse delegate at a State convention of master plumbers, after listening to a melancholy tale of the neglect of