without challenge; the prior question is not raised whether the case is one in which the majority should seek to impose by force its will on the minority. The question is not asked whether society, if left free to act according to its own laws, would not in due time—which is always better than undue time—accomplish the good that is aimed at, and with better ultimate results than when force is invoked to hasten the reform.
The specific danger of our time is the easy access which mere majorities have to the law-making power, with the consequent passion our several communities have acquired for what may he called the law-making habit—a habit entirely comparable with the drink-habit or the opium-habit. We stimulate or soothe ourselves with laws, as the case may be, instead of striving to bring about the end we desire by free cooperation. We legislate (in the most futile manner) against oleomargarine, we legislate against "bucket-shops," we legislate against railway discriminations, we legislate, or threaten legislation, against "combines" and "trusts"; and, having legislated, we legislate again and again to make up the deficiencies or remove the contradictions of former legislation. Meantime the growth of free opinion and sentiment on the subject matter of all this law-mongering is not aided but retarded. One result of this vicious habit is, that we do not give ourselves time to properly understand the workings of this or that tendency before we rush to legislation in order to forward or hinder it, according to the opinion we have been led to think it hurtful or beneficial. And how easily in many of these matters public opinion is swayed by mere catch-words no judicious student of public affairs can help being aware. As regards the treatment of our bodily ills, we have—at least intelligent people have—got to the point of distrusting the quacks who undertake to drive away every specific ailment by an equally specific nostrum; and we give our confidence rather to those who study the general conditions on which health depends, and who place their own chief reliance on the curative force of Nature. In statecraft, however, we hear nothing, broadly speaking, of general principles, nothing of the tendency of things to right themselves if left alone, nothing of the organic and organizing forces of society, but everything of the dependence of social well being upon specific measures of legislation. Politically, we are yet in the dark ages. It is true we have thrown off the power of the personal tyrant, but we have not entered into the freedom of those who look to Nature for their guidance, and who resent the yoke of all arbitrary laws, no matter by whom enacted. The time will come when the art of government, like the art of healing with which it has many points of analogy, will be put upon a natural basis, and then it will be seen more clearly than now how little government has to do with social organization beyond providing for it the necessary conditions of order and stability.
A PHILISTINE CHAMPION.
A certain record tells us that when the Philistine army was drawn up in front of that of Israel, a champion of great size, arrayed in portentous armor and carrying a sword and spear of enormous proportions, came forth from the Philistine ranks and challenged the Hebrews to send a man to fight with him. We read also that when David, the son of Jesse, stepped forth to the encounter, armed with a few pebbles, the huge Philistine "cursed him by his gods." Now, somehow or other, the Lord of Argyll and the Isles, who has lately stood forth, from another "Philistine" camp, to challenge the hosts of science, and, if not to curse, to indulge at least in some good Homeric loidoria, reminds us powerfully of that Goliath of Gath who had so vast a contempt
