AN APOSTATE DEMOCRACY. 665 



man's right to his own, and made contracts for him that he would not 

 have made for himself." 



Not the slightest heed is given to the fundamental induction of 

 social science that the advancement of civilization means the en- 

 largement of individual freedom and the growth of moral control. 

 So vast and complex is the machinery of modern industrialism that 

 its management must be left to the people that have staked their 

 fortunes and reputations upon its success. They alone possess the 

 incentive to pursue the line of conduct that shall not evoke the cen- 

 sure of the community, and to make the changes in production and 

 distribution that shall always be adjusted to varying needs and tastes. 

 But the new theory of civilization is that the more enlightened a 

 people become the more unfit they are to shape their own private 

 conduct and to control their own private business. The corollary is 

 that the only power competent to take charge of both and thus avert 

 the untimely crack of doom is the one generated by those marvelous 

 mechanisms of intrigue and corruption — the ballot box and party 

 government. Contemptuous of the irrefutable statement of Buckle 

 that " the best laws which have been passed have been the laws by 

 which some former laws were repealed," legislators are reviving in 

 the New World all the restrictions that crushed the individual and 

 industry in the Old. Creating boards, superintendents, and com- 

 missions for almost every conceivable purpose, from the examination 

 of barbers and plumbers to the control of insurance and railroad 

 companies, they are subverting not only personal freedom but local 

 self-government. " One may wonder," says Mr. Gamaliel Brad- 

 ford in a letter to the Boston Herald, calling attention to this amaz- 

 ing reversion to the despotism of the past, " how many people are 

 aware of the social revolution which is going on year by year at the 

 statehouse; the steady undermining of the local self-government 

 which has been the pride and boast of the State for more than two 

 centuries; the process by which we are being drawn under the cen- 

 tralizing despotism of the Legislature exercised through commissions 

 set up ... at its pleasure. There are now thirty-four of these," 

 he says, giving figures being rapidly duplicated in other States, 

 " many having extensive executive powers and under no effective 

 responsibility whatever." Like the legislatures themselves, they are 

 new centers of intrigue, corruption, and despotism. Playing the 

 role of the old court favorites, intrusted with some monopoly by a 

 complaisant autocrat, they bestow privileges and suppress rights. 



The form of property that has most frequently attracted the 

 malign attention of the apostates of democracy is corporate property. 

 Especially provocative of their philanthropy and greed have been 

 those large combinations of capital known as trusts, which are now 



VOL. LII. — 48 



