12 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



race for iudustrial and commercial supremacy. In the work of 

 lihilanthropj no people has done as much as they. The volume 

 of their personal effort and pecuniary contributions to ameliorate 

 the condition of the poor and unfortunate are without parallel in 

 the annals of charity. Yet Professor Ely, echoing the opinion of 

 Charles Booth and other misguided philanthropists, has the assur- 

 ance to tell us that " individualism has broken down." It is the 

 social philosophy that they are trying to thrust upon the world 

 again that stands hopelessly condemned before the remorseless tri- 

 bunal of universal experience. 



In the light thus x)btained from science and history, the duty 

 of the American people toward the current social and political 

 philosophy and all the quack measures it proposes for the amelio- 

 ration of the condition of the unfortunate becomes clear and ur- 

 gent. It is to pursue without equivocation or deviation the policy 

 of larger and larger freedom for the individual that has given the 

 Anglo-Saxon his superiority and present dominance in the world. 

 To this end they should oppose w^ith all possible vigor every pro- 

 posed extension of the duty of the state that does not look to the 

 preservation of order and the enforcement of justice. Regard- 

 ing it as an onslaught of the forces of barbarism, they should 

 make no compromise wdth it; they should fight it until freedom 

 has triumphed. The next duty is to conquer the freedom they 

 still lack. Here the battle must be for the suppression of the sys- 

 tem of protective tariffs, for the transfer to private enterprise and 

 beneficence, the duties of the post office, the public schools, and all 

 public charities, for the repeal of all laws in regulation of trade 

 and industry as well as those in regulation of habits and morals. 

 As an inspiration it should be remembered that the struggle is not 

 only for freedom but for honesty. For the truth can not be too 

 loudly or too often proclaimed that every law taking a dollar from 

 a man without his consent, or regulating his conduct not in accord- 

 ance with his own notions, but in accordance with those of his 

 neighbors, contributes to the education of a people in idleness and 

 crime. The next duty is to encourage on every hand an appeal 

 to voluntary effort to accomplish all tasks too great for the strength 

 of the individual. Whether those tasks be moral, industrial, or 

 educational, voluntary co-operation alone should assume them and 

 carry them to a successful issue. The government sliould have 

 no more to do with them than it has to do with the cultivation of 

 wheat or the management of Sunday schools or the suppression of 

 backbiting. The last and final duty should be to cheapen and, as 

 fast as possible, to establish gratuitous justice. With the great 

 diminution of crime that would result from the observance of the 



