660 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



bid the charter of business corporations for any other purpose than 

 those of mining, manufacturing, insurance, or transportation, and 

 especially may inhibit those for farming and trading purposes, or 

 trafficking in any manner in the necessaries of life. ... It may put 

 an end to combinations having for their object the control and 

 monopoly of particular articles of manufacture. ... It may put a 

 stop to the vicious system of building railroads and other public 

 works through construction companies organized by the directors of 

 their road in their own interest." He went so far as to express his 

 belief that, if need be, the State might limit the size of bequests. 

 " With its unlimited power to dispose of decedents' estates," he con- 

 tinued, " I know of no reason why the Legislature may not limit the 

 amount which any single individual may take by gift or devise, and 

 thus bring about, to a certain extent, the breaking up of enormous 

 fortunes upon the death of the owner." Becoming the victim of 

 a principle based upon a false practice, he plunged to deeper depths 

 of paternal despotism. " I have never been able," he argued, as is 

 so frequently done these days, " to perceive why, if the Government 

 may be safely intrusted to carry our letters and papers, it may not 

 with equal propriety carry our telegrams and parcels ; ... or why, 

 if our municipalities may supply us with water, they may not also 

 supply us with gas, electricity, telephones, and street cars." * 



Were such apostasy to the principles of the founders of the 

 republic confined to the expression of opinion, there might be little 

 occasion for protest or alarm. But it has passed into legislation, both 

 State and Federal, there to work its inevitable havoc, both moral 

 and industrial. Since the close of the war, the laws proposed and 

 enacted in Congress have constantly increased in scope and volume. 

 The solicitude of statesmen is not that of Hamilton and Jefferson — 

 to make the Federal Government the preserver of peace and the 

 protector of freedom — but to convert it into a universal beneficence 

 to fit out fools with brains and to render innocuous the virus of indo- 

 lence and perversity. Upon the assumption that the American farm- 

 ers, who have solved so many problems, from the extirpation of 

 beasts and savages to the reclamation of forests and bogs, are no 

 longer able to cope with a grub or beetle or to renew the life of an 

 exhausted soil, an insignificant bureau has been turned into a great 

 department of state. Not only has it been charged with the distribu- 

 tion of seeds, often more valuable to politicians than to agricultural- 

 ists, and of voluminous reports more common in junk shops than in 

 libraries, but it has just been authorized to furnish its helpless wards 

 with sample stretches of model roads. As if those miracles of 



* Proceedings of the American Bar Association, 1893, p. 235 et seq. 



