Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/136

124 But have they earned the right to set themselves up as international philanthropists, when their own hearthstone, according to Dr. Andrew D. White, is made red every year with the blood of more than ten thousand victims of the homicide Do their generous contributions to domestic charities and foreign missions entitle them to distinction as model representatives of Christian civilization, when mobs of leading citizens in New York and Ohio, as well as in various Southern States, lynch negroes charged with crimes that have not been proved? Has not Christian civilization some conquests to make in a land where, as in New Orleans, Italians are murdered with the approval of public sentiment, and, as in many parts of the West, the. treatment of Chinese is hardly less savage than that of European missionaries in the most benighted districts of the Celestial Empire? Is it not clear also that barbarism has yet to be abolished where striking workingmen burn down property and assail the men ready to take their places with a ferocity that the followers of Attila might have envied?

But it is not such obvious facts as these that justify the sneering smile of the cynic at the patriotic boast of Americans in regard to their civilization. Certain conspicuous features of our public policy are not less indicative of the tastes and instincts of a barbarian. Take, for one example, the provision of the Constitution of the State of New York that restricts prison labor. Had the convention that framed it proposed that, in order to relieve the Commonwealth of its criminal burden, a certain number of prisoners should be strangled every month, what an outburst of horror throughout the country there would have been! But the provision actually adopted by the picked representatives of the people and afterward approved by the people themselves is hardly less atrocious. The idleness it enforces is driving prisoners mad. Yet there is more effort to stop cruelty to animals and to throttle science by putting an end to vivisection than there is to suppress this form of atrocity. Take, for another example, the law recently passed that will either enhance the price or vitiate the quality of every commodity on which a protective duty is levied. A people really civilized could no more have permitted it to be placed on the statute books than they could permit thieves to rob the poor of a part of their food and clothing, making it more difficult for them to live and thus increasing the suffering that philanthropists and social reformers are seeking in endless ways to alleviate. It would have seemed to them nothing less than barbarous to pass a law that not only makes it more difficult for their own countrymen to live, but deprives people in foreign countries, like the Welsh tinplate makers and the Austrian pearl-button makers, of a means of livelihood. Take, for still another example, the imperfect international copyright law. People that appreciate in but a very indistinct manner the existence of property in ideas and refuse to protect it effectively do not meet the requirements of the definition of civilization.

But the policy of aggression, which is the more fit term that Mr. Spencer applies to what is called protection, a policy inherited directly from feudal barbarism, is not confined to tariff laws and imperfect international copyright laws; it extends to the innumerable laws passed by State and national Legislatures in restriction of personal liberty and in authorization of the seizure of private property for purposes outside of the legitimate sphere of government.