THE COMING SLAVERY. 727 



follow the direct results of his measures. Thus, to take a case con- 

 nected with one named above, it was not intended through the system 

 of " payment by results " to do anything more than give teachers an 

 efficient stimulus ; it was not supposed that in numerous cases their 

 health would give way under the stimulus ; it was not expected that 

 they would be led to adopt a cramming system and to put undue press- 

 ure on dull and weak children, often to their great injury ; it was not 

 foreseen that in many cases a bodily enfeeblement would be caused 

 which no amount of grammar and geography can compensate for. Nor 

 did it occur to the practical politicians who provided a compulsory load- 

 line for merchant-vessels, that the pressure of ship-owners' interests 

 would habitually cause the putting of the load-line at the very highest 

 limit, and that from precedent to precedent, tending ever in the same 

 direction, the load-line would gradually rise — as from good authority 

 I learn that it has already done. Legislators who, some forty years 

 ftgOj by act of Parliament compelled railway companies to supply 

 cheap locomotion, would have ridiculed the belief, had it been ex- 

 pressed, that eventually their act would punish the companies which 

 improved the supply ; and yet this was the result to companies which 

 began to carry third-class passengers by fast trains, since a penalty to 

 the amount of the passenger-duty was inflicted on them for every third- 

 class passenger so carried. To which instance concerning railways, 

 add a far more striking one disclosed by comparing the railway poli- 

 cies of England and France. The law-makers who provided for the 

 ultimate lapsing of French railways to the state never conceived the 

 possibility that inferior traveling facilities would result — did not fore- 

 see that reluctance to depreciate the value of property eventually com- 

 ing to the state would negative the authorization of competing lines, 

 and that in the absence of competing lines locomotion would be rela- 

 tively costly, slow, and infrequent ; for, as Sir Thomas Farrar has 

 shown, the traveler in England has great advantages over the French 

 traveler in the economy, swiftness, and frequency with which his jour- 

 neys can be made. 



But the " practical " politician, who, in spite of such experiences 

 repeated generation after generation, goes on thinking only of proxi- 

 mate results, naturally never thinks of results still more remote, still 

 more general, and still more important than those just exemplified. 

 To repeat the metaphor used above — he never asks whether the politi- 

 cal momentum set up by his measure, in some cases decreasing but in 

 other cases greatly increasing, will or will not have the same general 

 direction with other such momenta j and whether it may not join them 

 in presently producing an aggregate energy working changes never 

 thought of. Dwelling only on the effects of his particular stream of 

 legislation, and not observing how other such streams already existing, 

 and still other streams which will follow his initiative, pursue the same 

 average course, it never occurs to him that they may presently unite 



