Page:The Wisconsin idea (IA cu31924032449252).pdf/321

 the very quickest of all to foam at the very word 'Socialism,' is a string of acts each having as its tacit side-issue the partial redistribution of wealth and the spread of happiness!

"Thus far these measures, too, seem to have worked. The Old-Age Pensions act has undoubtedly mitigated a great deal of want and misery. And the so-called 'revolutionary' budget, of which so much disaster was predicted, has left behind it the unmistakable effect of improved business conditions and greater prosperity. This latter effect may have arisen simply from the ending of a business suspense. Still, a very bad measure would have permitted only a halfway recuperation. On the surface there seems nothing impractical about these ventures of government into the sphere of humanitarianism. There may be later and hidden costs to pay, but they are not now apparent. But the point of all this is the speculation which it warrants.

"May it not be that the time has come for us, after all, to frame slightly larger conceptions of government than we have been holding? Is the chief end of government any longer to be the collection of taxes, the maintenance of order, and the other material duties that have long been held to constitute its entire responsibility? Half unconsciously the men who have framed a network of paternalistic measures in Germany, even wider than that in England, seem to have assumed for government a new moral obligation. And this has been found not to involve any serious disturbances to property and vested rights. Are we perhaps going down a new path? Have these other countries beaten us by a decade to a now old and settled New Nationalism?"

Shall we always as our great Judge Ryan once said, "stand by the roadside and see the procession go by?" Shall we always hear the returning travellers' tale of the