464 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



jority believe that, whether we be Catholic or heterodox, we must 

 be for one or the other ; that there can be no middle ground. But 

 as a Catholic, Albert de Mun, has remarked, nothing so quickly 

 leads to inexactness as the passion for arranging men and doc- 

 trines in separate groups and designating them by special terms. 

 Such a classification would be especially fallacious in this case ; 

 for I do not know of any persons who utterly reject the interven- 

 tion of the state. In one sense everybody is an interventionist, for 

 we all agree with Leo and the theologians that it is the state's 

 duty to protect the rights of every one, and that the repression of 

 abuses belongs to it. But where does the function of protecting 

 individuals which devolves upon the state begin, where does it 

 end, over what does it extend ? We do not all form the same con- 

 ception of the attributes of the public power. This divergence is 

 more important to our society than the contests of republicans 

 and monarchists or the quarrels of opportunists and radicals. 

 This, and not fastidious controversies on forms of government or 

 the validity of constitutions, constitutes the vital question for 

 modern nations. 



The doctrine of laissez-faire, or let alone, has lately enjoyed in 

 some states an authority which it does not deserve. It was once 

 a device of freedom, but it was a negative device, and neither sci- 

 ence nor society can rest wholly on a negation. Those who have 

 tried to refer all economical science to it have only succeeded in 

 discrediting political economy and economists. The let-alone, ap- 

 plied where it does not belong to the work of children and girls 

 in the shop or the mine, for example becomes inhuman and 

 murderous, and, as it were, the accomplice of the criminal ex- 

 ploitation of misery and vice. Hence it has gone into disfavor ; 

 and, as often happens to our human weakness, which straightens 

 itself on one side only to lean over on the other, the inevitable 

 reaction against the famous maxim of Gournay has passed just 

 bounds. 



This phrase was applied by those who invented it to industry, 

 commerce, and labor. In demanding the let-alone, Gournay and 

 the economists of the eighteenth century claimed for every French- 

 man the right to make, sell, buy, and carry agricultural and in- 

 dustrial products freely. The demand was a protest against the 

 minute and ruinous regulations of the old regime, against the 

 pretension to hold in leading-strings everything in the kingdom 

 that lived by labor. In this sense the laissez-faire is eternally 

 true. Of all the phrases pronounced in France, it was one of 

 those which resounded the farthest the one, perhaps, that has 

 put French words upon the largest number of human lips. The 

 brief maxim, of which few know the author, has made the tour of 

 the globe, and has contributed a good share to the renovation of 



