their political creed. But if not averse to the encouragement of industry that a moderate tariff would give, they never imagined that the throttling of trade, such as began with the Morrill act and ended with that of Mr. Dingley, would come to be defended as a blessing in itself, and turned into a gospel of national wealth and happiness. Nor did they conceive that the Constitution, framed while the memory of the countless evils of an irredeemable currency was still fresh, would ever be quoted in approval of a step so calamitous. Least of all did it occur to them to resort to the power of taxation to suppress the right of a bank to issue its notes, and, with such tyranny as a precedent, to crush a growing traffic in a wholesome food, like the chemical substitutes for butter and cheese, and to extinguish a gambler's passion, like the patronage of a lottery or the solution of missing-word puzzles. They believed with Mr. Spencer that government had a different object. When, however, a nation becomes perverted, as Americans have been, by the evils and ethics of war, the maintenance of peace and freedom ceases to be an article of passionate faith; it is no longer an object of ceaseless pursuit. With ideas and feelings unconsciously and irresistibly shaped, not by constitutions and rational discussion, but by militant necessities, people do not look to themselves for the blessings of life; they look to the power that has shielded them from ruin. To it they intrust, without a doubt of their wisdom or a suspicion of their enslavement, a thousand duties that they alone should assume.
It is not the ignorant and thoughtless that fall a prey to the operation of a social law that they do not understand. People of intelligence and learning as well yield to the bondage of their environment. A member of the United States Supreme Court has repudiated as completely as any blatant socialist the peerless truth that the only government of a free democracy is the one that Jefferson described—the one that "shall restrain men from injuring one another" and "leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement." In an address before the American Bar Association, Justice Brown endowed the State with the paternal authority of a feudal despotism. "It may," he said, "fix the number of hours of a legal day's work, provide that payment be made at certain stated periods, protect the life and health of workingmen against accidents or diseases arising from ill-constructed machinery, badly ventilated rooms, defective appliances, or dangerous occupations, and may limit or prohibit altogether the labor of women and children in employments injurious to their health or beyond their strength. . . . It may," he added, describing still further the attributes of a government of the fourteenth century instead of the nineteenth, "by constitutional amendment, if necessary, for-
