he on-politics-living big and little bosses would lead
swiftly to anarchy. We have laws enough now, but the baser politicians
protect our city tramps, our gunmen, our decadents, our incendiaries
against our elected magistrates, in order that they may keep ready to
hand, and increase, the raw material of a purchasable vote, by the
domination and protection of which they keep themselves in power. That
is the whole secret of our municipal misgovernment wherever it exists,
and also the reason for our barbarous crimes. We have a cowed
magistracy seeking re-election from the manipulators of the
purchasable voters.

The truth is that the Sacculina method of social reform is nowhere a
success, certainly not in Germany. The Sacculina is a crustacean. It
attaches itself in the form of a simple sac to the crab, into which
its blood-vessels extend. It loses its power of locomotion and its
limbs disappear. It lives at the expense of the crab; activity is not
necessary, and it becomes the highest type of parasite, with no organs
except ovaries and blood-vessels. It can propagate, but has lost all
power or desire to do anything else. We have succeeded in producing no
small number of people of the Sacculina type by playing social and
political crab for them, and we are on the way to produce more, until
the crab is exhausted and the Sacculina is shaken into the water to
sink or swim for himself. "Charity causes half the suffering she
relieves, but she can never relieve half the suffering she causes."

Compulsory insurance was tried in the practical and economical Swiss
city of Basle and given up, because it was found that each year it was
the same small class who reaped the benefit of the insurance. The crab
gained nothing and the Sacculina became rapidly impotent. Basle, if I
mistake not, will have imitators, inclined to the philosophy of
Frederick the Great, who was surely no enemy to rational progress, but
who once said: "Depuis bien longtemps je suis convaincu qu'un mal qui
reste vaut mieux qu'un bien qui change."

A good deal of modern legislation is due to fatigue, and some of the
rest to ill-founded apprehension, that unless there is a change of
some kind the masters of the legislators will discharge them, because
they do not furnish enough novelties. In the meantime nobody is bold
enough to proclaim to the restless ones, seeking ever some new thing,
that there is nothing original except what has been forgotten. The
originalit