54 PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 
The geological, hydrographical, and topographical surveys, 
which almost every general and even local government of the 
civilized world is carrying on, are making yet more important 
contributions to our stock of geographical and general physical 
knowledge, and, within a comparatively short space, there will 
be an accumulation of well established constant and historical 
facts, from which we can safely reason upon all the relations 
of action and reaction between man and external nature. 
But we are, even now, breaking up the floor and wain- 
scoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling, for fuel 
to warm our bodies and to seethe our pottage, and the world 
cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact 
science has taught it a better economy. Many practical lessons 
haye been learned by the common observation of unschooled 
tice. The tremendous power of these associations is due not merely to 
pecuniary corruption, but partly to an old legal superstition—fostered by the 
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the famous Dartmouth 
College case—in regard to the sacredness of corporate prerogatives. There is 
no good reason why private rigits derived from God and the very constitu- 
tion of society should be iess respected than privileges granted by legislatures. 
It should never be forgotten that no privilege can be a right, and legislative 
bodies ought never to make a grant to a corporation, without express reser- 
vation of what many sound jurists now hold to be involved in the very nature 
of such grants, the power of revocation. Similar evils have become almost 
equally rife in England, and on the Continent; and I believe the decay of 
commercial morality, and of the sense of all higher obligations than those of 
@ pecuniary nature, on both sides of the Atlantic, is to be ascribed more to 
the influence of joint-stock banks and manufacturing and railway companies, 
to the workings, in short, of what is called the principle of ‘‘ associate ac- 
tion,” than to any other one cause of demoralization. 
The apophthegm, ‘‘ the world is governed too much,” though unhappily too 
truly spoken of many countries—and perhaps, in some aspects, true of all— 
has done much mischief whenever it has been too unconditionally accepted as 
a political axiom. The popular apprehension of being over-governed, and, I 
am afraid, more emphatically the fear of being over-taxed, has had much to 
do with the general abandonment of certain governmental duties by the ruling 
powers of most modern states. It is theoretically the duty of government to 
provide all those public facilities of intercommunication and commerce, which 
are essential to the prosperity of civilized commonwealths, but which indi- 
vidual means are inadequate to furnish, and for the due administration of 
