The ownership of one's earnings, with freedom to apply and enjoy them, was the greatest prize ever offered to stimulate the working genius of this world, and the results during the past hundred and fifty years have been phenomenal.
The world has progressed more within that time in those things which tend to complete living than it had previously progressed in all the ages that had dragged their slow length along since the world thawed out of the ancient ice.
But human agencies, like all agencies in nature, are essentially rhythmical. In order to accumulate the necessary energy and enthusiasm to go far enough in the right direction, we inevitably go too far, and, when the pendulum returns, it swings to the other extreme.
It is important to realize the great truth that freedom ends when it aims beyond the spirit which strives for the greatest good to the greatest number.
According to Herbert Spencer, the criminal classes are composed of those who have been pushed out of the race in the struggle for existence under modern conditions. They were normal components of society in the past, when all men were soldiers and all soldiers were bandits, and the principal business of mankind was piracy and war for plunder.
There being no longer the ever-present opportunity to join in an inter-tribal or an international war for robbery, the soldier-bandit now makes war upon society.
All of the Huns and Vandals in our midst are today armed with the short-sword of the ballot. How important it is then that they should be taught to know and to understand that in the use of this weapon their work should be formative and not deformative; that it should be constructive and not destructive!
Substitution of Law for War
The poet's words, "The parliament of man, the federation of the world," have become a very familiar quotation in recent years. Anciently all wisdom was taught in poesy, and we have never yet quite freed ourselves from the age-long habitude of receiving as unimpeachable wisdom whatever may be said in verse.
To the common mind, a statement in didactic verse has the proselyting power of Holy Writ. Now, this line of Tennyson, "The parliament of man, the federation of the world," points us toward a Utopia, without hope of actual attainment.