The antiquated and primitive doctrine of _laissez faire_, has been replaced by those of Division of Labor, and of Protection, in the cases of the strong who have demanded them, or who have purchased them through legislative cupidity; but still obtains in the cases of the weak and non-assertive.
[Sidenote: Strength Protected Weakness Unprotected]
The truant subjects of great nations, scattered in foreign lands, are hedged about with protection equal to an imperial guard; and thousands of men and millions of money are sacrificed to revenge an insult to, or protect the property of a claimant citizen at the Antipodes; while hundreds and thousands of the producers at home are starving and dying, because of the maladministration of the first principles of economies, and the _laissez faire license_ given to selfish and unscrupulous competition.
Arrogant commerce, and the already-powerful, have no end of protection; but the mind, the health, the child, and the producer, are left to the tender mercy of chance, or are hampered by crushing conditions of abuse and neglect contrary to every law of growth; and thus it must be; until we adopt the germ cure, as a principle of menticulture, and Emancipation, as the first evidence of intelligence and respectability.
In self-administration, the far-away habit is quite as prevalent as in the administration of Society. Men and women slave and save, to furnish means for sending missionaries to India, to release the Indian mind of imagined evils, while they crawl about servile to anger or worry, or both anger and worry. They set their ideal of happiness at an indefinite height, always out of reach. They hide their Heaven behind the curtain of death, and refuse to look for it within the precincts of their own heart. They waste precious time in speculating as to the form and attributes of the Cause of all things, its residence and disposition, while they smother under the pall of inappreciation, the best evidence of its existence, and the most potent workings of its power, within themselves. And all this because they work from the wrong end, and are dull to the efficacy of growth from the basis of Emancipation.
Their method of life is like the unraveling of a snarled skein from the middle. They fumble futilely at the snarl, and accomplish little, if anything, when they ought first to release the end within themselves, and follow the cord from that beginning, along the line of growth and organization, to the condition of unrestricted freedom, and usefulness,--the condition of Emancipated Brotherhood.