officers do not abuse their trusts. There is a duty in each case on the
interested parties to defend their own interest. The penalty of neglect
is suffering. The system of providing for these things by boards and
inspectors throws the cost of it, not on the interested parties, but on
the tax-payers. Some of them, no doubt, are the interested parties, and
they may consider that they are exercising the proper care by paying
taxes to support an inspector. If so, they only get their fair deserts
when the railroad inspector finds out that a bridge is not safe after
it is broken down, or when the bank examiner comes in to find out why a
bank failed after the cashier has stolen all the funds. The real victim
is the Forgotten Man again--the man who has watched his own
investments, made his own machinery safe, attended to his own plumbing,
and educated his own children, and who, just when he wants to enjoy the
fruits of his care, is told that it is his duty to go and take care of
some of his negligent neighbors, or, if he does not go, to pay an
inspector to go. No doubt it is often in his interest to go or to send,
rather than to have the matter neglected, on account of his own
connection with the thing neglected, and his own secondary peril; but
the point now is, that if preaching and philosophizing can do any good
in the premises, it is all wrong to preach to the Forgotten Man that it
is his duty to go and remedy other people's neglect. It is not his
duty. It is a harsh and unjust burden which is laid upon him, and it is
only the more unjust because no one thinks of him when laying the
burden so that it falls on him. The exhortations ought to be expended
on the negligent--that they take care of themselves.

It is an especially vicious extension of the false doctrine above
mentioned that criminals have some sort of a right against or claim on
society. Many reformatory plans are based on a doctrine of this kind
when they are urged upon the public conscience. A criminal is a man
who, instead of working with and for the society, has turned against
it, and become destructive and injurious. His punishment means that
society rules him out of its membership, and separates him from its
association, by execution or imprisonment, according to the gravity of
his offense. He has no claims against society at all. What shall be
done with him is a question of expediency to be settled in view of the
interests of society--that is, of the non-cr