162 Progress and Civilisation. PT, in. 



the fallacies of Communism or the deterioration 

 caused by indiscriminate relief, it met with no such 

 willing converts. 



The justice of this view is strongly illustrated at 

 the present moment in the controversies which are 

 raging between Capital and Labour, and in the 

 attempts which are made to alter the natural 

 balance between them by artificial limitations. The 

 leading principle in Political Economy is perhaps 

 contained in the celebrated answer of the French 

 merchants to the Minister Colbert, in the reign of 

 Louis XIV., ' Laissez-nous faire.' The cardinal 

 article in the creed of the political economist is 

 that all the constituents in the production of wealth 

 find their own level and adjust themselves, and that 

 any attempt to interrupt their natural course is 

 either vain or mischievous. Many of these errors 

 are to be traced to that thoroughly erroneous prin- 

 ciple of the natural equality of Mankind, a principle 

 which strongly exemplifies the pernicious effect of 

 a fundamental error in vitiating a whole train of 

 deductions and in rendering a theory thoroughly 

 unsound in all its consequences because of the 

 rottenness which is seated at its core. That we 

 shall find proofs of this in the latest achievements 





