great in law and morals against a poor man, is, nevertheless, practically null in the latter case. With the tendency of the law to extend the liability of the owners of capital for all the injuries attendant upon the use of capital, even to those injuries which proceed from it only constructively, and to relieve those who have no capital from ordinary human responsibility for themselves, this injustice is increasing. It is one of the results of the reckless dogmatizing which is going on in regard to social obligations, founded, not upon reasonable considerations of the relations which exist, but upon previously adopted partiality for one set of interests. Any assertion that wealth ought to have social or civil privileges sends a shiver of horror through modern society, which asserts that all men are equal; but how can two men be equal, one of whom is pecuniarily responsible for his contracts and his torts and the other is not?
It has been said above that if the man of property escapes the first anxieties about the possession of property, it must be because he lives in an orderly, civilized state, in which his neighbors concur to guarantee his security of possession. Hence, however, comes also the constraint of liberty by the state which protects; he who relies upon state protection must pay for it by limitations of liberty; by every new demand which he makes on the state, he increases its functions and the burden of it on himself. Weary of protecting himself, he begs the state to take care of him; the state, however, only orders him to take care of himself in co-operation with others under its supervision, and it takes toll from him in money, time, and services for giving him this good advice and this wholesome coercion.
From all this it appears, then, that in getting property we do not get liberty, in the sense of absence of
