Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/683

Rh does not name the despot that rivaled them in edicts for the regulation of the conduct of his subjects. The enactments of some legislatures number more than a thousand in a single session, and the enactments of all of them more than ten thousand. Is it any wonder that the accumulated mass of these experiments in legislation is fast throwing the law into a state of confusion, defying the labors of lawyers to master it, and of judges to interpret it, and that the American people are beginning to grasp wildly for any scheme that promises deliverance from the evil?

Like the Federal Constitution, the State Constitutions exhibit an anxious desire to rescue from destruction "the unalienable rights." Nearly all of them contain a version of the famous clause of the Magna Charta. "Were the fundamental principles of government set forth in them rigidly observed, the political despotism that now threatens to overthrow free institutions as completely as in Italy at the close of the middle ages would not be possible. "Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty, or property of freemen," says the Constitution of Wyoming as well as that of Kentucky, "exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority." More specific, the Constitution of North Dakota declares that "all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property and reputation, and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness." Nothing could be more admirable than the Constitution of Missouri. It asserts that "all constitutional government is intended to promote the general welfare of the people; that all persons have a natural right to liberty and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry; that to give security to these things is the principal office of government, and that when government does not confer this security, it fails of its design." The indisputable implication is that the functions of government should be limited to the preservation of order and the enforcement of justice. Were it to undertake anything else, it would not promote "the general welfare"; it would promote the welfare of some at the expense of others. Instead of the system of distribution by private contract, the only equitable one possible, it would introduce the system of distribution by force or favor. Instead of insuring to people "the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry," it would take the gains of some to bestow upon others.

But there is no such correspondence between principle and practice. More even than the acts of Congress do the acts of legislatures illustrate the impotency of any political contrivance, however ingenious, to curb the instincts of a degenerate democracy. Until