_Public responsibility._—The organization of community is best for the mass of the people when all desires are allowed to give their proper impulse to action, and when every enterprise is encouraged by freedom until it is seen to infringe upon the general welfare. Any system of government which checks natural impulses and hinders individual enterprise, without clear evidence that all must suffer from such freedom, is harmful. The genuine application of the phrase "laissez faire" is in giving honest efforts free course, because these efforts secure the largest good. It really means, leave humanity free until injury is attempted. In general, government has to deal with all necessities which are identical throughout the community. Provision for those necessities and those only it is bound to make. All questions of nationalization of industries or of community consumption must be brought to the test of universal need. What the whole community wants the whole community has a right to provide in the way which brings most good with least expenditure of exertion in any form. No other question can outweigh in importance this one of public need or public welfare. Every producer and every consumer is interested in seeing that such welfare is not overlooked by the public, or infringed upon by any individual or combination of individuals in his community. This must be done by emphasizing personal responsibility, even in public enterprises. For the statement is beyond dispute, that the attempt to substitute corporate responsibility for personal responsibility ends in no responsibility at all. Above all things it is necessary to remember that all the progress yet made from the starvation and degradation of barbarism has been by organized interest of the whole community in protecting first individual life, second individual liberty, and third individual property, as the foundation of universal welfare. Yet society holds all these rights of individuals subject to the same higher law of welfare by restricting the purpose of individuals when possible, and action always, if it opposes the total welfare. Chapter XXVIII. Economic Machinery Of Government.