There would be less injustice in aiding new enterprises by bounties; but the proper authorities to decide how much money should be voted for such purposes are the cities and towns. Some of the makers of our national Constitution wished to make tariff legislation in Congress impossible except by a majority of two-thirds; and this might properly be required for all measures not planned in behalf of individual liberty or the public safety. Much of the business now done by the nation ought to be transferred to the States. They took the lead between 1830 and 1870 in improving rivers and harbours, building railroads, and digging canals. The result of transferring such work to Congress was that in 1890 it voted $25,000,000 to carry on 435 undertakings, more than one-fourth of which had been judged unnecessary by engineers. Two years later, four times as many new jobs were voted as had been recommended by the House committee. Among these plans was one, in regard to the Hudson River, which was the proper business of the State of New York. The extravagance of our pension system is notorious. If the restriction proposed by Spencer is applicable anywhere, it is to central rather than local governments. VIII. Great as are the evils of unnecessary laws, Spencer's remedy is too sweeping to be universally supported by evolutionists. Huxley protests against it as "administrative Nihilism," and declares that if his next-door neighbour is allowed to bring up children "untaught and untrained to earn their living, he is doing his best to restrict my freedom, by increasing the burden of taxation for the support of gaols and workhouses which I have to pay." His conclusion is that "No limit is or can be theoretically set to state interference." The impossibility of drawing "a hard and fast line" is admitted even by so extreme an individualist as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, who complains that "Crimes go unpunished in England," while the "Great National Pickpocket" is busy "reading through all the comedies and burlesques brought out in the theatres," "running after little boys who dare to play pitch-farthing," or "going on sledging expeditions to the North Pole." Lecky agrees so far with Spencer and Mill as to say, in _Democracy and Liberty_, that punishment should "be confined, as a general rule, to acts which are directly injurious to others," and accordingly that "With Sunday amusements in private life, the legislator should have no concern." As a check to over-legislation, he recommends biennial sessions, instead of annual; and he protests against the despotism of trades-unions. His strongest point against Spencer is that sanitary legislation has added several years to the average length of life in England and Wales, prevented more than eighty thousand deaths there in a single year, and actually reduced the death-rate of the army in India by more than four-fifths.