i62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their 

 eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and con- 

 sideration, they forget all about the rights of other classes ; they 

 gloss over all the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate 

 their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of 

 property, distorting rights and perpetrating injustice, as any one is 

 sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the 

 interests of one group distinctly before his mind and the interests of 

 all other groups thrown into the background. When I have read cer- 

 tain of these discussions, I have thought that it must be quite dis- 

 reputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite 

 unjust to go one's own way and earn one's own living, and that the 

 only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing. The man who 

 by his own effort raises himself above poverty appears, in these dis- 

 cussions, to be of no account. The man who has done nothing to 

 raise himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about 

 him, bringing the capital which they have collected from the other 

 class, and promising him the aid of the state to give him what the 

 other had to work for. . . . On the theories of the social philoso- 

 phers to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judi- 

 cious living : * Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will 

 have to support other people ; if you do not get wealth, it will be the 

 duty of other people to support you.' " 



In his second chapter, the author dilates upon the proposition that 

 " A Free Man is a Sovereign, but that a Sovereign can not take 

 * Tips.' " He discourses as follows : " A free man, a free country, liberty 

 and equality, are terms in constant use among us. They are employed, 

 as watchwords as soon as any social question comes into discussion. It 

 is right that they should be so used. They ought to' contain the broad- 

 est convictions, and most positive faiths of the nation, and so they 

 ought to be available for the consideration of questions of detail. . . . 

 Probably the popular notion is, that liberty means doing as one has a 

 mind to, and that it is a metaphysical or sentimental good. A little 

 observation shows that there is no such thing in this world as doing 

 as one has a mind to. There is no man, from the tramp up to the 

 President, the Pope, or the Czar, who can do as he has a mind to. 

 Moreover, liberty is not a metaphysical or sentimental thing at all. 

 It is positive, practical, and actual. It is produced and maintained by 

 law and institutions, and is therefore concrete and historical. Some- 

 times we speak distinctly of civil liberty ; but if there be any liberty 

 other than civil liberty — that is, liberty under law — it is a mere fiction 

 of the school-men which they may be left to discus. . . . The notions 

 of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of a status created for 

 the individual by laics and institutions^ the effect of which is that each 

 man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers exclusively for his own 

 welfare. It is not at all a matter of elections, or universal suffrage, or 



