4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



the skilled, and much more the unskilled, are liable to mistakes in the 

 identification of disorders and in the appropriate treatment ; and that, 

 having disregarded the warning derivable from common experience, 

 he was answerable for the consequences. 



We measure the responsibilities of legislators for mischiefs they 

 may do, in a much more lenient fashion. In most cases, so far from 

 thinking of them as deserving any kind of punishment for causing dis- 

 asters by laws ignorantly enacted, we scarcely think of them as de- 

 serving reprobation. It is held that common experience should have 

 taught the druggist's assistant, untrained as he is, not to interfere ; 

 but it is not held that common experience should have taught the 

 legislator not to interfere till he has trained himself. Though multi- 

 tudinous facts are before him in the recorded legislation of our own 

 country and of other countries, which should impress on him the im- 

 mense evils caused by wrong treatment, he is not condemned for dis- 

 regarding these warnings against rash meddling. Contrariwise, it is 

 thought meritorious in him when — perhaps lately from college, per- 

 haps fresh from keeping a pack of hounds which made him popular 

 in his county, perhaps emerging from a provincial town where he 

 acquired a fortune, perhaps rising from the bar at which he has gained 

 a name as an advocate — he enters Parliament, and forthwith, in quite 

 a light-hearted way, begins to aid or hinder this or that means of 

 operating on the body politic. In this case, there is no occasion even 

 to make for him the excuse that he does not know how little he knows ; 

 for the public at large agrees with him in thinking it needless that he 

 should know anything more than what the debates on the proposed 

 measures tell him. 



And yet the mischiefs wrought by uninstructed law-making, vast 

 in their amount as compared with those caused by uninstructed medi- 

 cal treatment, are conspicuous to all who do but glance over its his- 

 tory. The reader must pardon me while I recall a few familiar in- 

 stances. Century after century statesmen went on enacting usury 

 laws which made worse the condition of the debtor — raising the rate 

 of interest " from five to six when intending to reduce it to four," * 

 as under Louis XV ; and producing undreamed-of evils of an indirect 

 kind, such as preventing the reproductive use of spare capital, and 

 " burdening the small proprietors with a multitude of perpetual ser- 

 vices." f So, too, the endeavors which in England continued through 

 five hundred years to stop forestalling, and which in France, as Arthur 

 Young witnessed, prevented any one from buying "more than two 

 bushels of wheat at market," J went on generation after generation, 

 increasing the miseries and mortality due to dearth ; for, as everybody 

 now knows, the wholesale dealer, who was in the statute " De Pistori- 



* Lecky, " Rationalism," ii, pp. 293, 294. 



f De Tocqueville, " The State of Society in France before the Revolution," p. 421. 



X Young's " Travels," i, pp. 128, 129. 



