ristotle, but whether this axiom can be accepted fully or not, it is
undoubtedly true that you can first dragoon and then coddle a whole
people, into a lack of independence and a shrinking from the
responsibilities of freedom.

We are drugging the people ourselves just now with legislation as a
cure for the evils of industrialism, but such legislation will only do
what soporifics can do, they numb the pain, but they never bring
health. What a forlorn philosophy it is! Men take advantage, rob and
steal, we say, and to do away with this we give up the fight for fair
play and orderliness and propose sweeping away all the prizes of life,
hoping thus to do away with the highwaymen of commerce and finance. If
there is no booty, there will be no bandit, we say, forgetting
altogether the corollary that if there are no prizes there will be no
prizemen! Neither God nor Nature gives anything to those who do not
struggle, and both God and Nature appoint the stern task-master,
Necessity, to see to it that we do struggle. Now come the ignorant and
the socialists, demanding that the state step in and roll back the
very laws of creation by supplying what is not earned from the surplus
of the strong. Who cannot see anarchy looming ahead of this programme,
for it is surely a lunatic negation of all the laws of God and Nature?
They do not seem to see either in America or in England that state
supervision carried too far leads straight to the sanction of all the
demands of socialism and syndicalism. Legislation was never intended
to be the father of a people, but their policeman. Overlegislation,
whether by an autocrat or a democratic state, leads straight to
revolution, to Caesarism, or to slavery.

In Germany the state by giving much has gained an appalling control
over the minute details of human intercourse. I am no philosophic
adviser to the rich; it is as the champion of the poor man that I
detest socialism and all its works, for in the end it only leads
backward to slavery. Every vote the workingman gives to a policy of
wider state control is another link for the chains that are meant for
his ankles, his wrists, and his neck. If the state is to take care of
me when I am sick or old or unemployed, it must necessarily deprive me
of my liberty when I am well and young and busy, and thus make my very
health a kind of sickness. A year in Germany ought to cure any
sensible workingman of the notion that the state is a better guardian
of