612 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cases which lawyers know will never be heard, and which, when 

 brought into court, the over-burdened judges get rid of by appointing 

 junior counsel as referees : an arrangement under which the suitors 

 have not simply to pay over again all their agents, at extra rates, but 

 have also to pay their judges. 1 Is not that, too, a flagitious laissez- 

 faire f Though, in our solicitude for Negroes, we have been spend- 

 ing 50,000 a year to stop the East- African slave-trade, and failing to 

 do it, yet only now are we providing protection for our own sailors 

 against unscrupulous ship-owners only now have sailors, betrayed 

 into bad ships, got something more than the option of risking death 

 by drowning or going to prison for breach of contract ! Shall we not 

 call that, also, a laissez-faire that is almost wicked in its indifference ? 

 At the same time that the imperativeness of teaching all children to 

 write, and to spell, and to parse, and to know where Timbuctoo lies, 

 is being agreed to with acclamation, and vast sums raised that these 

 urgent needs may be met, it is not thought needful that citizens 

 should be enabled to learn the laws they have to obey ; and though 

 these laws are so many commands which, on any rational theory, the 

 Government issuing them ought to enforce, yet in a great mass of 

 cases it does nothing when told that they have been broken, but 

 leaves the injured to try and enforce them at their own risk, if they 

 please. Is not that, again, a demoralizing laissez-faire an encourage- 

 ment to wrong-doing by a half-promise of impunity ? Once more, 

 what shall we say of the laissez-faire which cries out because the civil 

 administration of justice costs us 800,000 a year because to protect 

 men's rights we annually spend half as much again as would build an 

 iron-clad ! because to prevent fraud and enforce contracts we lay out 

 each year two-thirds of the sum our largest distiller pays in spirit- 

 duty ! what, I ask, shall we say of the laissez-faire which thus thinks 

 it an extravagance that one-hundredth part of our national revenue 

 should qt> in maintaining? the vital condition to national well-beings ? 

 Is not that a laissez-faire which we might be tempted to call insane, 

 did not most sane people agree in it ? And thus it is through out. 

 The policy of quiescence is adopted where active interference is all- 

 essential ; while time, and energy, and money, are absorbed in inter- 

 fering: with things that should be left to themselves. Those who 

 condemn the let-alone policy in respect to matters which, to say the 

 least, are not of vital importance, advocate or tolerate the let-alone 

 policy in respect to vitally-important matters. Contemplated from 

 the biological point of view, their course is doubly mischievous. 

 They impede adaptation of human nature to the social state, both 

 by what they do and by what they leave undone. 



Neither the limits of this chapter, nor its purpose, permit exposi- 

 tion of the various other truths which Biology yields as data for 



1 And even then there are often ruinous delays. A barrister tells me that in a case 

 in which he was himself the referee they had but six meetings in two years. 



