Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/692

672 a far more powerful bureaucracy, and has led to much greater social and political demoralization.

The spirit of proscription as well as restriction, so conspicuous in Federal legislation since the civil war, is also potent in State legislation. The Federal Constitution has, of course, made it impossible to establish tariff barriers between the States. But the exaction of licenses of commercial travelers and other checks to inter-State commerce show no lack of will or effort to evade the provision. More successful schemes to prevent foreign competition have been the laws that exclude non-residents from oyster beds and salmon fisheries. Other legislation, equally repugnant to American freedom, forbids to citizens or corporations of other States the ownership and operation of railroads. The feeling against the residents of foreign countries is still more irrational and hostile. The immigration offices established in many States during the period of enlightenment and tolerance have, I believe, with but a single exception, all been abolished. Not only have some of the States forbidden the employment of aliens on public works, but they have forbidden them the ownership of lands within their borders. So rampant has the spirit of intolerance become within the past two years that their exclusion from all other forms of investment has been suggested. Yet we continue to boast of American freedom and enlightenment!

Without tracing the apostacyapostasy [sic] of American democracy into the narrower but not poorer field of municipal legislation, with its countless ordinances from the regulation of the use of nursing-bottles to the suppression of department stores, let us inquire into the fruits of these exhaustive labors of philanthropists and statesmen. Let us ask whether the one have been commensurate with the other. Have the American people been made moral and humane? While more insistent upon their own rights, have they become more considerate of the rights of others? Can it be said, in a word, that social, political, and industrial life to-day indicates a higher civilization than before the war?

Not to one of these questions can an affirmative answer be given. At no time since the adoption of the Constitution has there been such widespread and well-founded complaint about the greed of capital, the tyranny and brutality of labor, the shocking prevalence of crime, especially lynchings, and the corruption and degradation of politics with the unprecedented growth of the boss system. A legislature does not sit, be it State or national, that is not besieged by men supposed to represent more than any other class the intelligence and morality of the community for favors of every kind—valuable franchises, exemptions from taxation, or other special privileges. The chief argument in behalf of socialism has come to