tent to know, that if the street sweepings in any of the great cities were properly gathered, dried, and pressed into convenient form for shipment, they would form a cheap and convenient fertilizer which would find a ready market among the farmers throughout the country, and yield a net income sufficient to defray a large share of the municipal expenses.

The same characteristics of government are shown in other countries as well as our own. Prof. W. S. Jevons, in an address before the Manchester Statistical Society, in April 1867, stated that "in England, the state manufacturing establishments, especially the dockyards, form the very types of incompetent and wasteful expenditure. They are the running sores of the country, draining away our financial power.

Officialism is more than corrupt and wasteful; it is always inefficient; and delays the adoption of improvements long after their merit has been abundantly proved. A striking instance of this is shown in the introduction of lemon juice into the English navy. It was not until more than two hundred years after its specific qualities had been demonstrated, and forty years after the chief admiralty officer had given conclusive evidence of its worth, before it was regularly supplied to naval vessels as a part of their stores, notwithstanding that during that time the scurvy carried off more victims than all the battles, wrecks, and other casualties of sea life put together.

Legislators make high sounding speeches in favor of reform, and economy in general, and when a special appropriation is to be made from which friends or constituents are to profit, they logroll and work in its favor as if their political existence depended upon its passage, which it often does. Thus private and political interests are unseen factors in the passage of every law except such as are purely acts repealing previous acts. The greater the

number of undertakings which government assumes, the wider the scope of these private and political interests, and the more corrupt does government necessarily become. Law is like what Walter Bagehot affirms of the English monarchy. He says, "Our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. You must not let in daylight upon magic." When you begin to poke about the law, to find out what the law does, and why and how it does it, you can no longer reverence it. No man can study the history of legislation in any country for a considerable time, and trace its effects, without being struck with the uniform viciousness of it. Who would increase the power of such a hydra? Rather kill it. "Sovereign power, without sovereign knowledge is something which contradicts itself."-Thomas Paine.

Herbert Spencer describes the state thus:

"A cluster of men (a few clever, many ordinary, and some decidedly stupid) we ascribe to it marvelous powers of doing multitudinous things which men otherwise clustered are unable to do, we petition it to procure for us in some way which we do not doubt it can find, benefits of all orders; and pray it with unfaltering faith to secure us from every fresh evil. Time after time our hopes are balked. The good is not obtained, or something bad comes along with it; the evil is not cured, or some other evil as great or greater is produced. Our journals, daily and weekly, general and local, perpetually find failures to dilate upon: now blaming, and now ridiculing, first this department and then that. And yet, though the rectification of blunders, administrative and legislative, is a main part of public business-though the time in the legislature is chiefly occupied in amending, until after many mischiefs implied by those needs for amendment, then comes at last repeal; yet from day to day increasing numbers of wishes are expressed for legal repressions and and state management."

CHAPTER VI.

OF CRIME; ITS NATURE AND CAUSE.

One of the most important of the ostensible functions of government is the detection, punishment, and prevention of crime; in fact, the preservation of security is generally held to depend upon the repression of an assumed natural tendency among a part of the people to violate the rights of society, assuming that society has any rights to violate. That part of the people who are supposed to naturally prey upon others, and upon society, are called criminals; and are treated as if they were essentially different from other individuals not criminal. The difference between these, and the ordinary citizen, has come to be broadly and generally expressed as "bad," and "good," the bad being understood, to mean not only those actually criminal, but with strong criminal tendencies, while the good comprise those who are supposed to be devoid of such tendencies.

In the treatment of any subject it is important, at the very outset, to get a clear idea of the thing under consideration. So, in the examination of crime, we must first understand what crime is before we can reach any proper understanding of its cause and cure.

The popular conception of crime is that it consists in some lapse from a more or less generally accepted standard of virtue, arising from an inherent viciousness on the part of the criminal; in other words, a moral delinquency. This view is wholly erroneous, as is shown on slight consideration. Regarding the precept, "Thou shalt not steal, as a proper moral standard, does the law look upon its violation as necessarily criminal? Not at all.

He who takes the substance of another without recompense as rent, interest, taxes, or insufficient wages, is a highly respectable citizen. There is not the least suspicion of criminality about him; but if he from whom these sums were taken, recognizing his own property, retakes it, he is a thief, and is punished as a criminal. If an American farmer takes his wheat to market across an imaginary line called the Canadian frontier, and brings back clothing for himself and family without notifying a custom-house officer, and submitting to a robbery of a large part of the value of the clothing, he is a felon, and is punished criminally, although he has done no wrong to a living man. If under the brutalizing influences of poverty, and the stress of extreme want, one waylays and kills another, and thus obtains relief from present needs, he is a criminal-a murderer, and will be punished accordingly. But if a judge, a sheriff, a lawyer, and a jury of a dozen men organize a conspiracy to kill him, although without any of the impelling influences. which prompted him to commit the first offense, they are highly respectable, will have their portraits published in the morning papers, and be looked up to, as, in a manner distinguished. And when the killing takes place it will receive the sanction and benediction of the church. If another, in a moment of anger slays a fellow man, this too is crime; but if a lot of politicians quarrel among themselves, they may organize war upon still others, against whom they had no quarrel, and slay innocent people at wholesale, and instead of an implication of criminality, the thing is "glorious war," the amount of the glory depending upon the extent of the slaugh

ter.

So that crime is exceedingly variable. It depends upon no recognized moral standard. It is what the law says is crime. Sometimes it says one thing, and sometimes another. It changes with every change in the law relating to crime.

As this subject has to do with man in society it will be profitable at this point to recall some of the conclusions reached in Part 11, in the study of man as an individual, because they throw important light upon the whole problem of crime.

Our analysis of man showed that all are actuated by the same motive; follow the same guide; and work to the same end: the making of individual character through the pursuit of individual happiness; that all possess the same mental and physical constitution; and all are subject to the same needs, and laws of growth. We found also, that society itself is but the expression of the selfish requirements of the individuals composing it; that it exists solely to gratify those needs; must be purely mutual and voluntary; and involves no surrender of any individual right. We found more; we found that men are practically equal in all those things which determine their relations to society; and that liberty is the equivalent, and resultant, of equality. These things being true, the law which violates equality by setting up artificial rights of property, and enforcing those rights by oppressive regulations which keep people poor, prevent the natural gratification of their desires, suppress their aspirations, and arrest their development, naturally and certainly operates to produce what are termed criminals. Then the nature of crime is, that it is the natural resistance, or protest, against the oppressions of the law; that law, itself being a violation of natural right, is the real criminal, while those who resist it and put it to open shame are really the virtuous, and deserve the commendations instead of the curses of their fellows. This is not only true as to some crime, but if our previous analyses are correct, it must be true of all crime; and that law, which ostensibly exists to protect the persons and property of the people, directly promotes the violation of them; and thus, as in the