Nor is this all, nor the worst. There is another article, and far more damaging, in the indictment. Through Protection, and because of it, Paternalism has crept in; and, like a huge cancerous growth, is eating steadily into the vitals of the political system. Instead of supporting a government economically administered by money contributed by the People, a majority of the People to-day are looking to the government for support, either directly through pension payments or indirectly through some form of industrial paternalism. Incidentally, a profuse public expenditure is condoned where not actually encouraged. Jeffersonian simplicity is preached; extravagance is practised. As the New York showman long since shrewdly observed: "The American people love to be fooled!"
But I must pass on; I still have far to go. As respects legislation, I have said that sixty years ago, when my memories begin, the American ideal was the individual, and individuality. This, implied adherence to the Jeffersonian theory that heretofore the world had been governed too much. The great secret of true national prosperity, happiness and success was, we were taught, to allow to each individual the fullest possible play, provided only he did not infringe on the rights of others. How is it to-day? America is the most governed and legislated country in the world! With one national law-making machine perpetually at work grinding out edicts, we have some fifty provincial mills engaged in the same interesting and, to my mind, pernicious work. No one who has given the slightest consideration to the subject will dispute the proposition that, taking America as a whole, we now have twenty acts of legislation annually promulgated, and with which we are at our peril supposed to be familiar, where one would more than suffice. Then we wonder that respect for the law shows a sensible decrease! The better occasion for wonder is that it survives at all. We are both legislated and litigated out of all reason.
Passing to the other proposition of individuality, there has been, as all men know and no one will dispute, a most perceptible tendency of late years towards what is known as the array of one portion of the community--the preponderating, voting portion--against another--the more ostentatious property-holding portion. It is the natural result, I may say the necessary as well as logical outcome, of a period of too rapid growth,--production apportioned by no rule or system other or higher than greed and individual aptitude for acquisition. I will put the resulting case in the most brutal, and consequently the clearest, shape of which I am capable. Working on the combined theories of individualism controlled and regulated by competition, it has been one grand game of grab,--a process in which the whole tendency of our legislation, national or state, has during the last twenty years been, first, to create monopolies of capital and, later, to bring into existence a counter, but no less privileged, class, known as the "wage-earner."