It is a perilous habit to fall into at the best--that of regarding the present condition of society as something doomed to destruction. But the evil is unmistakeable and most pernicious, when it is proclaimed, that in the new and expected order of things, the old morality will be entirely superfluous, a mere folly, an infliction on ourselves and others. Why take care of the old furniture, that will be worse than an incumbrance in the new premises? Why not begin at once the work of battery and destruction? The influence which these speculations exert in unsettling men's notions upon the duties of government, on the first principles of political or social economy, is less glaring, but not, on this account, the less prejudicial. Men, who are far from embracing entirely any one of the schemes of these socialists, fall into the habit of looking for the relief and amelioration of society to some legislative invention, some violent interference with the free and spontaneous course of human industry. The _organization of industry_ is the phrase now in high repute; repeated, it is true, with every variety of meaning, but always with the understanding, that government is to interfere more or less in the distribution of wealth, in the employment of capital, and the exercise of labour. The first principles on which modern civilization is based, are taxed as the origin of all the evils that afflict society. All our soundest maxims of political economy are discarded and disgraced. That each man shall be free in the choice and practice of his trade or calling--that the field of competition shall be open to all--that each individual shall be permitted to make the best bargain he can, whether for the wages of his labour or the price of his commodities--all these trite but invaluable maxims are incessantly decried, and nothing is heard of but the evils of competition, and the unequal recompense of labour. In their fits of impotent benevolence, these speculative physicians assail, as the cause of the existing distress, those principles which, in fact, are the conditions of all the prosperity we have attained, or can preserve, or can hope in future to attain.