It is true, nature must be obeyed in order that she may he conquered: but then she is to be CONQUERED. It has been too much the fashion of late to travestie that great dictum of Bacon's into a very different one, and say, Nature must be obeyed because she cannot be conquered; thus proclaiming the impotence of science to discover anything save her own impotence--a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon's own hopes of what science would do for the welfare of the human race. For what is all human invention, but the transcending and conquering one natural law by another? What is the practical answer which all mankind has been making to nature and her pretensions, whenever it has progressed one step since the foundation of the world: by which all discoverers have discovered, all teachers taught: by which all polities, kingdoms, civilizations, arts, manufactures, have established themselves; all who have raised themselves above the mob have faced the mob, and conquered the mob, crucified by them first and worshipped by them afterwards: by which the first savage conquered the natural law which put wild beasts in the forest, by killing them; conquered the natural law which makes raw meat wholesome, by cooking it; conquered the natural law which made weeds grow at his hut door, by rooting them up, and planting corn instead; and won his first spurs in the great battle of man against nature, proving thereby that he was a man, and not an ape? What but this?--'Nature is strong, but I am stronger. I know her worth, but I know my own. I trust her and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall be, and not my tyrant; and if she interfere with my ideal, even with my personal comfort, then Nature and I will fight it out to the last gasp, and Heaven defend the right!' In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early, or laissez faire School of Political Economy. It was too much inclined to say to men: 'You are the puppets of certain natural laws. Your own freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist merely as a dangerous disease. All you can do is to submit to the laws, and drift whithersoever they may carry you, for good or evil.' But not less certainly was the same blame to be attached to the French Socialist School. It, though based on a revolt from the Philosophie du neant, philosophie de la misere, as it used to term the laissez faire School, yet retained the worst fallacy of its foe, namely, that man was the creature of circumstances; and denied him just as much as its antagonist the possession of freewill, or at least the right to use freewill on any large scale.