748 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that it is more true of the action of men in their corporate capacity 

 than it is of the doings of individuals. The wisest and most dispas- 

 sionate man in existence, merely wishing to go from one stile in afield 

 to the opposite, will not walk quite straight — he is always going a little 

 wrong, and always correcting himself ; and I can only congratulate the 

 individualist who is able to say that his general course of life has been 

 of a less undulating character. To abolish state action, because its 

 direction is never more than approximately correct, appears to me to 

 be much the same thing as abolishing the man at the wheel altogether, 

 because, do what he will, the ship yaws more or less. " Why should 

 I be robbed of my property to pay for teaching another man's chil- 

 dren?" is an individualist question, which is not unfrcquently put as 

 if it settled the whole business. Perhaps it does, but I find difficulties 

 in seeing why it should. The parish in which I live makes me pay my 

 share for the paving and lighting of a great many streets that I never 

 pass through ; and I might plead that I am robbed to smooth the way 

 and lighten the darkness of other people. But I am afraid the paro- 

 chial authorities would not let me off on this plea ; and I must confess 

 I do not see why they should. 



I can not speak of my own knowledge, but I have every reason to 

 believe that I came into this world a small reddish person, certainly 

 without a gold spoon in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible ab- 

 stract or concrete "rights " or property of any description. If a foot 

 was not, at once, set upon me as a squalling nuisance, it was either the 

 natural affection of those about me, which I certainly had done noth- 

 ing to deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was 

 painfully built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented 

 that catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from 

 the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did any- 

 thing to deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it 

 strikes me that, though I may have fairly earned my day's wages for 

 my day's work, and may justly call them my property — yet, without 

 that organization of society, created out of the toil and blood of long 

 generations before my time, I should probably have had nothing but a 

 flint axe and an indifferent hut to call my own ; and even those would 

 be mine only so long as no stronger savage came my way. 



So that if society, having — quite gratuitously — done all these things 

 for me, asks me in turn to do something toward its preservation — even 

 if that something is to contribute to the teaching of other men's chil- 

 dren — I really, in spite of all my individualist leanings, feel rather 

 ashamed to say no. And if I were not ashamed, I can not say that 

 I think that society would be dealing unjustly with me in converting 

 the moral obligation into a legal one. There is a manifest unfairness 

 in letting all the burden be borne by the willing horse. 



It does not appear to me, then, that there is any valid objection 

 to taxation for purposes of education ; but, in the case of technical 



