We are drugging the people ourselves just now with legislation as a cure for the evils of industrialism, but such legislation will only do what soporifics can do, they numb the pain, but they never bring health. What a forlorn philosophy it is! Men take advantage, rob and steal, we say, and to do away with this we give up the fight for fair play and orderliness and propose sweeping away all the prizes of life, hoping thus to do away with the highwaymen of commerce and finance. If there is no booty, there will be no bandit, we say, forgetting altogether the corollary that if there are no prizes there will be no prizemen! Neither God nor Nature gives anything to those who do not struggle, and both God and Nature appoint the stern task-master, Necessity, to see to it that we do struggle. Now come the ignorant and the socialists, demanding that the state step in and roll back the very laws of creation by supplying what is not earned from the surplus of the strong. Who cannot see anarchy looming ahead of this programme, for it is surely a lunatic negation of all the laws of God and Nature? They do not seem to see either in America or in England that state supervision carried too far leads straight to the sanction of all the demands of socialism and syndicalism. Legislation was never intended to be the father of a people, but their policeman. Overlegislation, whether by an autocrat or a democratic state, leads straight to revolution, to Caesarism, or to slavery. In Germany the state by giving much has gained an appalling control over the minute details of human intercourse. I am no philosophic adviser to the rich; it is as the champion of the poor man that I detest socialism and all its works, for in the end it only leads backward to slavery. Every vote the workingman gives to a policy of wider state control is another link for the chains that are meant for his ankles, his wrists, and his neck. If the state is to take care of me when I am sick or old or unemployed, it must necessarily deprive me of my liberty when I am well and young and busy, and thus make my very health a kind of sickness. A year in Germany ought to cure any sensible workingman of the notion that the state is a better guardian of his purse and his powers than he is himself. A distinguished German publicist, criticising this overpowering interference of the state, writes: "Mir ist wohl bewusst dass diese Gedanken einst weilen fromme Wuensche bleiben werden: die Schatten laehmender Muedigkeit die fiber unserer Politik lagern, lassen wenig Hoffnung auf froehliche Initiative. Allein immer kann und wird es nicht so bleiben." And he ends with the ominous words: "Reform oder Revolution!"