ight.

Government is for man, and not man for government. Men wish to do what
is best for themselves, and eventually they will, if let alone, but they
can only grow through constant practise and frequent mistakes. Plato's
plan for an ideal republic provided rules and laws for the guidance of
the individual. In the Mosaic Laws it is the same: every circumstance
and complication of life is thought out, and the law tells the
individual what he shall do, and what he shall not do. That is to say, a
few men were to do the thinking for the many. And the argument that
plain people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since the
wise know better what is for their good, is exactly the argument used by
slaveholders: that they can take better care of the man than the man can
of himself.

There is a certain plausibility and truth in this proposition. It is all
a point of view.

But to Herbert Spencer there was little difference between enslavement
of the mind and enslavement of the body. Both were essentially wrong in
this--they interfered with Nature's law of evolution, and anything
contrary to Nature must pay the penalty of pain and death. All forms of
enslavement react upon the slaveholder, and a society founded on force
can not evolve--and not to evolve is to die. The wellsprings of Nature
must not be dammed--and in fact can not be dammed but for a day.
Overflow, revolution and violence are sure to follow. This is the
general law; and so give the man liberty. One man's rights end only
where another man's begin.

The idea of evolution, as opposed to a complete creation, was in the
mind of Spencer as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight. In that year
he said, "Creation still goes forward, and to what supreme heights man
may yet attain no one can say."

By a sort of general misapprehension, Darwin is usually given credit for
the discovery and elucidation of the Law of Evolution, but the "Origin
of Species" did not appear until Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, and both
Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace had stated, years before, that the
theological dogma of a complete creation had not a scintilla of proof
from the world of nature and science, while there was much general
proof that the animal and vegetable kingdom had evolved from lower
forms, and was still ascending.

The usual idea of the clergy of Christendom was that if the account of
creation given by Moses were admitted to be untrue, then the Bible in
all its par