If a
policeman picks him up, we say that society has interfered to save him
from perishing. "Society" is a fine word, and it saves us the trouble
of thinking. The industrious and sober workman, who is mulcted of a
percentage of his day's wages to pay the policeman, is the one who
bears the penalty. But he is the Forgotten Man. He passes by and is
never noticed, because he has behaved himself, fulfilled his
contracts, and asked for nothing.

The fallacy of all prohibitory, sumptuary, and moral legislation is the
same. A and B determine to be teetotalers, which is often a wise
determination, and sometimes a necessary one. If A and B are moved by
considerations which seem to them good, that is enough. But A and B put
their heads together to get a law passed which shall force C to be a
teetotaler for the sake of D, who is in danger of drinking too much.
There is no pressure on A and B. They are having their own way, and
they like it. There is rarely any pressure on D. He does not like it,
and evades it. The pressure all comes on C. The question then arises,
Who is C? He is the man who wants alcoholic liquors for any honest
purpose whatsoever, who would use his liberty without abusing it, who
would occasion no public question, and trouble nobody at all. He is the
Forgotten Man again, and as soon as he is drawn from his obscurity we
see that he is just what each one of us ought to be.

X.

_THE CASE OF THE FORGOTTEN MAN FARTHER CONSIDERED._

There is a beautiful notion afloat in our literature and in the minds
of our people that men are born to certain "natural rights." If that
were true, there would be something on earth which was got for nothing,
and this world would not be the place it is at all. The fact is, that
there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent
and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the price of it. The
rights, advantages, capital, knowledge, and all other goods which we
inherit from past generations have been won by the struggles and
sufferings of past generations; and the fact that the race lives,
though men die, and that the race can by heredity accumulate within
some cycle its victories over Nature, is one of the facts which make
civilization possible. The struggles of the race as a whole produce the
possessions of the race as a whole. Something for nothing is not to be
found on earth.

If there were such things as natural rights, the question would arise,