ians--they always
begin with the question of _remedies_, and they go at this without any
diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society.
They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never
take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the
remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy
implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution
of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious
injunction to the quacks is, to mind their own business.

The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be
more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to
see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An
examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they
are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have
a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with.
Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight
against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes,
affections, desires, and sufferings. When he dies, life changes its
form, but does not cease. That means that the person--the centre of all
the hopes, affections, etc.--after struggling as long as he can, is
sure to succumb at last. We would, therefore, as far as the hardships
of the human lot are concerned, go on struggling to the best of our
ability against them but for the social doctors, and we would endure
what we could not cure. But we have inherited a vast number of social
ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of
all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the
past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit,
fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in
political economy and social science. It is a fact worth noticing, just
when there seems to be a revival of faith in legislative agencies, that
our States are generally providing against the experienced evils of
over-legislation by ordering that the Legislature shall sit only every
other year. During the hard times, when Congress had a real chance to
make or mar the public welfare, the final adjournment of that body was
hailed year after year with cries of relief from a great anxiety. The
greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in
undoing the work of statesm