is restricted. If he can patronize no letter carrier but the Government, to which he must pay a certain rate, no matter how excessive, he has to a degree become a slave. The same is true if he can not employ whomever he pleases to cut his hair, or to fix his plumbing, or to prescribe for his health. Still truer is it if he is obliged to contribute to a system of public education which he condemns, or to public charities which he knows to be schools of pauperism, or to any institution or enterprise that voluntary effort does not sustain. In whatever way the Government may pounce upon him to force him to work for some one besides himself and to square his conduct with notions not his own, he is still a victim of aggression, and the aggression is none the less real and demoralizing because it is not committed amid the roar of cannon and the groans of the dying.
To what extent the American people have become victims of this kind of aggression can not be determined with precision. Still, an idea may be had from the volume of laws enacted at every legislative session, and the amount of money appropriated to enforce them. A commonplace little appreciated is that every one of them, no matter what its ostensible object, either restricts or contributes to individual freedom. The examination of any statute-book will soon make painfully apparent the melancholy fact that the protection of individual freedom figures to the smallest extent in the considerations of the wise and benevolent legislator. Of the eight hundred enactments of the Legislature of the State of New York in 1897, for example, I could find only fifty-eight that had this supreme object in view. If we apply the same ratio to the work of all the legislatures of the country, and, allowing for biennial sessions, make it cover a period of two years—namely, 1896 and 1897—the astonishing result will be that, of the 14,718 laws passed, all but 1,030 aim, not to the liberation but to the enslavement of the individual. But to this restrictive legislation must be added the thousands of acts and ordinances of town, city, and county legislatures that are more destructive of freedom even than the State and Federal legislation. If not more numerous, they are certainly more minute, meddlesome, and exasperating.
As to the amount of plunder passing through the hands of the modern condottieri, that is susceptible of an estimate much more accurate. If we take the expenditures of all the governments of the United States, Federal, State, municipal, county, and town, for a similar period of two years, they reach the enormous total of two billion dollars, equal to more than two thirds of the national debt at the close of the civil war.[1] Of this sum only about one hundred
- ↑ In order to get at the full amount of plunder, I ought to know how much the beneficiaries of tariff and other laws pocket. But statistics on this point are unfortunately not to be had. The amount must, however, be very large.
