Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
In the light thus obtained from science and history, the duty of the
American people toward the current social and political philosophy
and all the quack measures it proposes for the amelioration of the
condition of the unfortunate becomes clear and urgent. It is to
pursue without equivocation or deviation the policy of larger and
larger freedom for the individual that has given the Anglo-Saxon his
superiority and present dominance in the world. To this end they should
oppose with all possible vigor every proposed extension of the duty
of the state that does not look to the preservation of order and the
enforcement of justice. Regarding it as an onslaught of the forces of
barbarism, they should make no compromise with it; they should fight it
until freedom has triumphed. The next duty is to conquer the freedom
they still lack. Here the battle must be for the suppression of the
system of protective tariffs, for the transfer to private enterprise
and beneficence, the duties of the post office, the public schools, and
all public charities, for the repeal of all laws in regulation of trade
and industry as well as those in regulation of habits and morals. As
an inspiration it should be remembered that the struggle is not only
for freedom but for honesty. For the truth can not be too loudly or
too often proclaimed that every law taking a dollar from a man without
his consent, or regulating his conduct not in accordance with his own
notions, but in accordance with those of his neighbors, contributes to
the education of a people in idleness and crime. The next duty is to
encourage on every hand an appeal to voluntary effort to accomplish
all tasks too great for the strength of the individual. Whether those
tasks be moral, industrial, or educational, voluntary co-operation
alone should assume them and carry them to a successful issue. The
government should have no more to do with them than it has to do with
the cultivation of wheat or the management of Sunday schools or the
suppression of backbiting. The last and final duty should be to cheapen
and, as fast as possible, to establish gratuitous justice. With the
great diminution of crime that would result from the observance of the
duties already mentioned there would be much less occasion than now
to appeal to the courts. But, whenever the occasion arises, it should
involve no cost to the person that feels that his rights have been
invaded.
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