Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/680

660 the charter of business corporations for any other purpose thanthose of mining, manufacturing, insurance, or transportation, and especially may inhibit those for farming and trading purposes, or trafficking in any manner in the necessaries of life. . . . It may put an end to combinations having for their object the control and monopoly of particular articles of manufacture. . . . It may put a stop to the vicious system of building railroads and other public works through construction companies organized by the directors of their road in their own interest." He went so far as to express his belief that, if need be, the State might limit the size of bequests. "With its unlimited power to dispose of decedents' estates," he continued, "I know of no reason why the Legislature may not limit the amount which any single individual may take by gift or devise, and thus bring about, to a certain extent, the breaking up of enormous fortunes upon the death of the owner." Becoming the victim of a principle based upon a false practice, he plunged to deeper depths of paternal despotism. "I have never been able," he argued, as is so frequently done these days, "to perceive why, if the Government may be safely intrusted to carry our letters and papers, it may not with equal propriety carry our telegrams and parcels;. . . or why, if our municipalities may supply us with water, they may not also supply us with gas, electricity, telephones, and street cars."

Were such apostasy to the principles of the founders of the republic confined to the expression of opinion, there might be little occasion for protest or alarm. But it has passed into legislation, both State and Federal, there to work its inevitable havoc, both moral and industrial. Since the close of the war, the laws proposed and enacted in Congress have constantly increased in scope and volume. The solicitude of statesmen is not that of Hamilton and Jefferson—to make the Federal Government the preserver of peace and the protector of freedom—but to convert it into a universal beneficence to fit out fools with brains and to render innocuous the virus of indolence and perversity. Upon the assumption that the American farmers, who have solved so many problems, from the extirpation of beasts and savages to the reclamation of forests and bogs, are no longer able to cope with a grub or beetle or to renew the life of an exhausted soil, an insignificant bureau has been turned into a great department of state. Not only has it been charged with the distribution of seeds, often more valuable to politicians than to agriculturalists, and of voluminous reports more common in junk shops than in libraries, but it has just been authorized to furnish its helpless wards with sample stretches of model roads. As if those miracles of