THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 153 



hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in 

 the history of the world are they doing all they can to further sur- 

 vival of the unfittest ! 



But the postulate that men are rational beings continually leads one 

 to draw inferences which prove to be extremely wide of the mark.* 



"Yes, truly ; your principle is derived from the lives of brutes, 

 and is a brutal principle. You will not persuade me that men are to 

 be under the discipline which animals are under. I care nothing for 

 your natural-history arguments. My conscience shows me that the 

 feeble and the suffering must be helped ; and, if selfish people won't 

 help them, they must be forced by law to help them. Don't tell me 

 that the milk of human kindness is to be reserved for the relations 

 between individuals, and that governments must be the administra- 

 tors of nothing but hard justice. Every man with sympathy in him 

 must feel that hunger and pain and squalor must be prevented, and 

 that, if private agencies do not suffice, then public agencies must be 

 established. " 



Such is the kind of response which I expect to be made by nine 

 out of ten. In some of them it will doubtless result from a fellow- 

 feeling so acute that they can not contemplate human misery without 

 an impatience which excludes all thought of remote results. Con- 

 cerning the susceptibilities of the rest, we may, however, be somewhat 

 skeptical. Persons, who, now in this case and now in that, are angry 

 if, to maintain our supposed national " interests " or national "^65- 

 tige,^'' those in authority do not promptly send out some thousands of 

 men to be partially destroyed while destroying other thousands of 

 men whose intentions we suspect, or whose institutions we think dan- 

 gerous to us, or whose territory our colonists want, can not after all 

 be so tender in feeling that contemplating the hardships of the poor is 

 intolerable to them. Little admiration need be felt for the professed 

 sympathies of men who urge on a policy which breaks up progressing 

 societies, and who then look on with cynical indifference at the wel- 

 tering confusion left behind, with all its entailed suffering and death. 

 Those who, when a people asserting their independence successfully 



* The saying of Emerson, that most people can understand a principle only when its 

 light falls on a fact, induces me here to cite a fact which may carry home the above 

 principle to those on whom in its abstract form it may produce no effect. It rarely hap- 

 pens that the amount of evil caused by fostering the vicious and the good-for-nothing 

 can be estimated. But in America, at a meeting of the State Charities Aid Association, 

 held on December 18, 18*74, a startling instance was given in detail by Dr. Harris. It 

 was furnished by a county on the upper Hudson, remarkable for the ratio of crime and 

 poverty to population. Generations ago there had existed a certain " gutter-child," as 

 she would be here called, known as " Margaret," who proved to be the prolific mother of 

 a prolific race. Besides great numbers of idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, 

 and prostitutes, " the county records show two hundred of her descendants who have been 

 criminals." Was it kindness or cruelty which, generation after generation, enabled these 

 to multiply and become an increasing curse to the society around them ? 



