The public at large awakened to a dazed realization of the head-way which the new idea had made. It had become a cult of the ruling-class, the esoteric religion of the state; everywhere its defenders sprang up--it seemed as if all the intellectual as well as the material power of the community was under its spell. To oppose it was not merely bad form--it was to incur a stigma of moral inferiority, to be the victim of a “slave-ethic”.
With the scientific world, of course, its victory was speedy; the new doctrine was in line with recognized evolutionary teaching. The great names of Darwin and Spencer were invoked in its support; and, of course, when it came to economic science, there could be no two opinions. Had _laissez-faire_ ever meant anything, if _laissez-faire_ did not mean this?
At the very outset, the country was startled by the publication of a book by a college professor, famed as a leading sociologist, in which the case was presented without any attempt at sophistication. It was a fact, needing no attestation, that the mass of mankind had always lived in a state of slavery. At the present hour, under the forms of democracy, there were a quarter of a million men killed every year in industry, and half a million women living by prostitution, and two million children earning wages, and ten million people in want; and in comparison with these things, how humane was the new cult, how honest and above-board, how clean and economical! For the first time there could be offered to the submerged tenth a real social function to be performed. Once let the new teaching be applied upon a world-wide scale, and the proletariat might follow its natural impulse to multiply without limit; there would be no more “race-suicide” to trouble the souls of eminent statesmen.
And this at the time when the attention of the community was focussed upon the new _cause célèbre_! When the public prints were filled with an acrimonious discussion as to the meaning of the instructions given to the jury. If anyone chose to will his body to a purchaser, said the judge, and then go and commit suicide, there was no law to prevent him; and, of course, the subsequent purposes of the purchaser had nothing to do with the point at issue. This was a matter of taste--here the learned justice rapped for order--a matter of prejudice, largely, and the question at issue was one of law. There was no law controlling a man’s dietetic idiosyncrasies, and it was to be doubted if constitutionally any such law would stand--certainly not in a federal court, unless it chanced to be a matter of interstate commerce.