Page:The Factory Controversy - Martineau (1855).djvu/16

 as in the United States; or occasional, as on the Continent,—it might be expected that the government, or at least the parliamentary portion of it, would have some notion, fixed enough for common use, as to what its own business was, even if speculative philosophers were still far from the end of their controversies as to the true scope of legislation, and function of the executive. But experience shows that even in stable, quiet, constitutional England, there is still plenty of uncertainty about the relations between the government and several classes, if not the whole, of the nation. Our fathers outgrew the meddling of successive governments with the cost of their food and the mode of their dress. Our own fathers told us we had nothing more to fear from attempts to fix the rate of wages by Act of Parliament. Yet here we are once again in the midst of confusion and actual danger to our liberties, from the same tendency in busy and shallow minds to recur to legislation for the carrying of their objects, encouraged as that tendency is by the ignorance and carelessness of our law-makers and their constituents, as to the principles which should prescribe and limit the sphere of legislation. When we are in Paris, we thank our stars that we are not trammelled by law and police in every act of our lives; that we can buy a dose of medicine without a permit, and draw our supplies from the country without paying a tax at the city gates, When we talk by the fire-side with our elderly relations, we hear wonderful stories of the old plagues of excise intrusion, and the custom-house tyranny which made our whole coast a harbourage for smugglers; and we think it a fine thing to live in times of such domestic freedom as the present. Yet, in this very present, so free, and so convenient in its freedom, there has been an advancing encroachment on the liberty of the citizen, aggravated since the war began to an intolerable degree, which justifies our appeal to government, and yet more to the constituents of government, to take care what they are about. The false philanthropy, which is one of the unwholesome growths of a protracted period