504 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



takes in those, perhaps, who have studied the political -writings of 

 Herbert Spencer, and have translated his sturdy and wholesome 

 demands for the largest possible individual liberty to require a 

 perpetually negative attitude on the part of the Government. 



It is difficult to say which class, if left to itself, would make 

 America the more unendurable. 



It is this question of our ideal of government which is involved 

 in the proposed nationalization of university extension, and not a 

 mere question of past or probable experience. 



This opens one of the most profound problems in our Ameri- 

 can political life, and one which may be stated indeed but scarcely 

 discussed within such brief limits as the present. Yet feeling 

 that the issue under discussion has its solution in the solution of 

 this larger question, I can not refrain from calling attention to 

 the very doubtful character of the liberty which is to be enjoyed 

 under a regime of social and governmental negations. Writers 

 of the sentimental school of political economy — a school which 

 oddly enough includes many prosaic labor agitators of the pres- 

 ent day — fairly gloat over their picture of the ideal liberty en- 

 joyed by man in his pre-social existence. But there are many 

 who can feel no enthusiasm for this impossible picture. Place a 

 naked man on an island in the Pacific, and, however generous 

 Nature may be, however free he may be from the tyrannies of 

 modern society, it would be the worst mockery to speak of him 

 as enjoying liberty, for liberty, as a man of any imagination 

 must perceive, presupposes not only the absence of restrictions 

 upon individual action, but also the presence of certain condi- 

 tions which will make those desired actions possible. In a word, 

 liberty is a positive and not a 7iegative condition. Again I 

 venture upon the use of Italics to emphasize what seems to me a 

 most important truth. When we contemplate the narrowing and 

 annoying restrictions which the holders of the ideal of a paternal 

 government would impose upon American life — the eternal thou 

 shalts and thou shalt nots of prohibitionists and dictators of all 

 classes — the temptation is to swing to the opposite extreme of the 

 pendulum, and declare that absolute non-interference on the part 

 of Government is the only safeguard. When, further, one reads 

 Herbert Spencer's admirable volume on Justice — admirable, that 

 is to say, excepting his unfortunate utterances on the status of 

 woman in the state — one is, at first, confirmed in this negative 

 retreat. The sole function of Government is to insure the great- 

 est possible individual liberty consistent with the liberty of all. 

 This is the conclusion which one of the most profound thinkers 

 of the century reaches at the end of a long and thought-crowded 

 life. And one could ask for no better definition. But how is this 

 conclusion to be applied ? That is the question. There is a tend- 



