roads and other corporations to give reasons for dismissals, and forbid them to list the knaves and incompetents. But, whatever be the benefit of such laws, the employees of farmers or merchants have no share in them. Equally odious discriminations provide that goods made by union labor shall have the protection of special labels; that wage creditors shall have the preference over clerks and domestic servants; that in suits for manual services, the plaintiff shall get special attorney's fees from the defendant. To the great inconvenience of labor as well as capital, it is not permitted to pay wages in longer periods than those prescribed, or in commodities other than legal tenders. Finally, there are laws that fix the length of day and the rate of wages on public works, thus plundering the men who have to work a longer day and at the lower wages of free competition. But instead of overthrowing by such enactments the despotism of capital, labor only stimulates its growth. For every bureau, every inspector, every aggression on an employer or a fellow-employee, is another drop of vitriol poured upon its own wounds—another nail driven into the coffin of its own freedom.
Though the descendants of the self-reliant and liberty-loving New-Englanders, the farmers of the United States have also fallen a prey to the vicious principles of an apostate democracy. Many of them have surpassed the foreign-born citizens themselves in their devotion to the political ideas that belong to the military despotisms of Europe. In some of the Southern and Western States, where the Anglo-Saxon blood is purest, the subtreasury scheme, the free coinage of silver, and the government ownership and management of railroads and telegraphs have had their greatest vogue. Only among the peasants of the old régime would it be possible to find the prototypes of the men that have lost their skill in wresting a living from an exhausted or a half-cultivated soil, and clamor for the aid of the State in their struggle with the forces of Nature and the competition of their fellows. When some De Tocqueville of the future shall study the subversion of American freedom, what a curiosity will he find in the law with its bureaucratic machinery for the extirpation of the gypsy moth! How he will marvel over the decadence of the people that appeal to the same power to save their fruit trees from the ravages of disease and insects, and their fields from the invasion of noxious weeds! If the farmers themselves fail to apply the remedies that benevolent legislators have prescribed, equally benevolent officials are authorized to destroy the trees found diseased, and uproot the weeds before they go to seed. Similar laws have been enacted for the protection of the health of domestic animals. One provides that sheep must be annually dipped to guard against scab. In the case of cattle suspected of tuber-
