6 7 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



roads and other corporations to give reasons for dismissals, and for- 

 bid them to list the knaves and incompetents. But, whatever be the 

 benefit of such laws, the employees of farmers or merchants have 

 no share in them. Equally odious discriminations provide that 

 goods made by union labor shall have the protection of special 

 labels; that wage creditors shall have the preference over clerks and 

 domestic servants; that in suits for manual services, the plaintiff 

 shall get special attorney's fees from the defendant. To the great 

 inconvenience of labor as well as capital, it is not permitted to pay 

 wages in longer periods than those prescribed, or in commodities 

 other than legal tenders. Finally, there are laws that fix the 

 length of day and the rate of wages on public works, thus plundering 

 the men who have to work a longer day and at the lower wages of 

 free competition. But instead of overthrowing by such enactments 

 the despotism of capital, labor only stimulates its growth. For 

 every bureau, every inspector, every aggression on an employer or 

 a fellow-employee, is another drop of vitriol poured upon its own 

 wounds — another nail driven into the coffin of its own freedom. 



Though the descendants of the self-reliant and liberty-loving 

 !N"ew-Englanders, the farmers of the United States have also fallen 

 a prey to the vicious principles of an apostate democracy. Many 

 of them have surpassed the foreign-born citizens themselves in their 

 devotion to the political ideas that belong to the military despotisms 

 of Europe. In some of the Southern and Western States, where the 

 Anglo-Saxon blood is purest, the subtreasury scheme, the free coin- 

 age of silver, and the government ownership and management of 

 railroads and telegraphs have had their greatest vogue. Only among 

 the peasants of the old regime would it be possible to find the proto- 

 types of the men that have lost their skill in wresting a living from 

 an exhausted or a half-cultivated soil, and clamor for the aid of the 

 State in their struggle with the forces of Nature and the competi- 

 tion of their fellows. When some De Tocqueville of the future shall 

 study the subversion of American freedom, what a curiosity will 

 he find in the law with its bureaucratic machinery for the extirpa- 

 tion of the gypsy moth! How he will marvel over the decadence 

 of the people that appeal to the same power to save their fruit trees 

 from the ravages of disease and insects, and their fields from the 

 invasion of noxious weeds ! If the farmers themselves fail to apply 

 the remedies that benevolent legislators have prescribed, equally 

 benevolent officials are authorized to destroy the trees found dis- 

 eased, and uproot the weeds before they go to seed. Similar laws 

 have been enacted for the protection of the health of domestic 

 animals. One provides that sheep must be annually dipped to 

 guard against scab. In the case of cattle suspected of tuber- 



