statute on the pitiful ground that interstate commerce was being interfered with; but the right of the free people of the state of South Carolina to engage in trade and manufacture was crushed by the Legislature and the courts, of that state under a most extreme doctrine of paternalism.

Laws have been passed in one state and another abridging the right of contract, the right to sell merchandise, the right to labor upon public works, the right to labor more than a certain number of hours, the right to freely come and go, the right to pursue legitimate trades, and a mass of others. Some of these laws go directly to the point, but the majority proceed by indirection. Too many succeed in evading the decree of unconstitutionality and bear oppressively on natural rights. The selfish interest of classes ever anxious to push on their own fortunes, reckless of what destruction is wrought to others, is their moving cause. Legislatures, pliantly serviceable to the demands of influential cliques and unchecked by weak-kneed governors, spread them on the statute books, and there they stand, discouraging prophecies of the decadence of popular rights under democracy. They hide in swarms behind the newly coined phrase, "police power," and that other more venerable phrase, "the public welfare," both of which, like "public policy," are often, if one may use such an expression, liveries of heaven stolen to serve the devil in.

Municipal corporations, with their stores of delegated powers, are the natural propagating grounds for laws which hedge in and pinch the free-born American until he sometimes wonders if he were not better off to live under the benign sway of Turkish Pasha or Algerian Dey. A respectable farmer comes to town with his much-prized fresh vegetables and proceeds to sell them from house to house, and straightway the green grocer, who prospers behind plate-glass windows, hies him to the council and gets an ordinance passed which provides that all persons who peddle vegetables shall pay a license fee of fifty dollars, under penalty, etc., and no person shall peddle before eleven o'clock in the forenoon. Sustained as a reasonable exercise of the delegated taxing power. Result: the farmer is driven to sell his stock wholesale to the green grocer, and the citizen buys vegetables from the green grocer, as the law, paternally administered, ought to compel him to anyhow. In one

city in California to adjust things properly with persons of Chinese birth, the ordinance is reported to have applied only to persons carrying baskets suspended from the two ends of a stick.

A newspaper item from Olympia recently said: "The peddler nuisance is a sore spot with the business men of this city, and some time ago they had the city council put a heavy tax on these itinerant merchants." This was along with the news that the council had removed a police justice who had dared to hold their "heavy tax" ordinance unconstitutional.

And this in the name of "liberty" and "constitutional rights" under the very shadow of the capitol.

Where and when was the idea born that the state, through a municipal corporation, can use its taxing power to drive one man out of business for the benefit of another, or all the others, or to compel the people of a town to buy their goods across a counter instead of at the tail of a cart? Answer: Answer: It is only the legiti mate conclusion from the argument that the private interest of the many is the supreme care of the state, and that the private interest of the few can be made to yield to it. That is state socialism, the most insidious foe of individual liberty.

Granted, at

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Even education has taken a hand in this business. once, that it is within the power, or even that it is the duty of the state to furnish its people the means of education. Our constitution declares the making of ample provision for education to be its paramount duty; so that it is here beyond question. But I fail to understand where, under any system of government based on ideas of liberty, the state can force a child to school. Yet compulsory education, or at least compulsory attendance upon state schools, is getting a hold, and we have it upon our own statute books. not sure but that mercenary reasons, namely, the system of parceling out the public school funds on the basis of attendance, had a great deal to do with our law of '97 and '99; but there are those who pretend to found the right to compel children to be educated on principle. For more than a century the states have been striving to afford the best facilities for education, and they have invited all children to make use of them. But now the child, instead of being invited, is to become a conscript, for a certain number of months in a certain number of consecutive years. Thus the entire

relation between the school child and the school is completely revolutionized. The school house is now to represent a governmental institution imposed as a burden on the shoulders of infants, with a forced enlistment of all children, male and female, who are sufficiently able in body to endure it; and the agents of the state are to determine the question of ability. This looks like a rescript of the emperors. But, says one, it is certainly for the good of the children. Agreed, if the system be reasonably conducted. But so would it be well for every one of them to take a daily bath, to have plenty of play and amusement, to do some physical labor, and, in the end, to have a complete scientific, literary, musical and every other imaginable education. When you urge the welfare of the child, and justify his compulsory education on that ground, you assert the right to keep him in leading strings until any age the law may prescribe; you may make his term a number of months, or the entire year; you may set him to learning Greek, Sanscrit or Choctaw, and you may prescribe his diet, his clothing and his hour of retiring; there is no limit to the control you may assert and enforce. He no longer belongs to himself, but becomes a socialistic unit, out of which the state may make whatever its great purpose may decree.

But there is another phase of it. Under natural laws, from the savage to the most enlightened, the parents of children are entitled to their control until years of discretion bring about emancipation, and never have we seen the time when pride and natural affection has not served to induce parents to give their offspring the benefit of all opportunities offered for their education, so far as their circumstances would permit. This is said in full view of the exceptional cases where just laws have been passed to prevent the oppression of children by overwork and neglect.

Children have rights, even against their parents, which it is the state's duty to protect. But parents who are the most devoted, and seek by every means to educate their children, sometimes have a choice as to the persons by whom and the principle under which their children shall be educated. In our system the teaching of religion is prohibited by the constitution, but there are thousands who conscientiously believe that prohibition to be subversive of all true education.

Others prefer to commit their children to private

schools, and still others to private tutors, and some choose to assume the position of teachers themselves. Hitherto the parent has been the judge of all these things and many more, and the child's attendance upon the public school was at his own selection. But now all is proposed to be changed. The rule adopted in this state is not yet a severe one, but the principle has been asserted, and the right to deprive the parent of all privilege with and control over his child's education is wrapped up in it. If the law can say that every child must attend the public school, or some other school of similar character, it can say that the child must attend the public school only. If it can punish me for not sending my child to school for six months, it can double the time; and if it can take the child from the age of seven to fifteen, it can take it from four to twenty-one. Nay, it can rob the mother's yearning arms of her baby, provide a nurse in the person of a state officer, and bring it up by hand, without knowledge of its parents or their affection. If you wish to find the best arguments for the adoption of such a principle, go among the leading advocates of socialism and the international who urge the abolition of all private property, the division of the profits of labor, and the monopoly of all business by the state, for the common welfare, with compulsory education in schools and along lines to be fixed by law. This may be the ideal government, and we may, in time, approach it; but the steps we take in that direction are just so many departures from the ideal we set up in 1776. They believe in a paternal, communistic government, wherein the individual is nothing but a producer and divisor of the general goods, and where the state is everything; but we believe, or commenced with the belief, that the individual is the superior, whose opportunities and labors the state is ordained to protect, with the least possible interference with private right and natural laws.

Having had bad luck in the introduction of sundry means of ameliorating life in towns through the agency of quasi-public corporations, we have now advanced far on the road to another plan, which bids fair to be a Pandora's box of troubles, and to pile the burden of taxation, like Pelion upon Ossa, on the shoulders of already groaning taxpayers. We have discovered the existence of "natural monopolies" and that there is foundation for the claim that

the private purveyor of them demands a higher price and furnishes a poorer quality of them than he ought. This delinquency is due solely to the fact that we do not exercise the ample powers of regulation over him which we possess. We could control him, and make him deal fairly, but our representatives have, in some instances, neglected the business entrusted to them, and in some they have deliberately betrayed it. No business of the kind included in the term "natural monopolies " ought to be carried on in a town by any one unless it pays, or promises to pay, a fair return upon the capital invested. We may, perhaps, except from this statement the supplying of water. But we have become excited over bad service and what we believe to be high prices and undue profits, owing, as said before, to our own failure to regulate these matters as we might, and now it is proposed that we discard forever the doctrine that business is for the individual and go into it as a community. Instead of having numerous small monopolies we propose to have one monopoly of monopolies. We propose to take all the chances of business, and resort to the tax-roll for any deficiency of returns. If there be no street railroad in our town, because no sane business man would venture his money in such an enterprise, we will issue bonds, build roads and tax the owners of property for principal and interest if fares do not supply the money. Of course the conservative stickler for principle is met with illustrations drawn from Glasgow, Buda Pesth and Paris, and he is supposed to be silenced with references to the corruption of Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. But he is not convinced that government has any such sphere, or that it has any right to tax the private purse of the citizen for any such object, for it all comes back to that. If a city can build a railroad upon its credit, it can build it out of its general fund, and it can run it free of charge to all passengers. If there is nothing in the constitution to prohibit the one, there is nothing to prohibit the other. Chapter 112 of the Laws of Washington for 1897 expressly provides for the construction of street railways and many other plants, by any city or town in the state out of money, principal and interest, to be provided for by taxation only. If I were discussing the effect of such laws it would be interesting to consider the financial condition of the cities and towns of this state were they the owners of