The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1891-08-01

ought 70 pension everybody that was
physically incapacitated at the rate OF
from LIS. to Dos. Q week; that, since
soldiers were pensioned, who were nom
producers, the productive worker, who
was more profitable 70 the state should,
when worn out at the loom. the
mill, or the docks, be as well cared
for as the soldier. On this
reasoning, the United states would
have to pension the agricultural laborers
behind the army who supported il, and
would be expected TO pension the labor Of
today whose product pays the pension
bill; that il, there would have 10 be
General Dependent Pension Act, un-
der which everybody would get .
pension from the state; the decrepit sol
diers and laborers who have preserved the
state, and then In their turn the labor that
is preserving the state today. To this abb
surd conclusion would this logic Of pater-
nalism bring rs at last. Under these cir
cumstances, instead of the people taking
care of the state, the state would be put
ting the whole mass of working people on
the pension roll.
In Europe this doctrine that the gov
eminent should furnish work and wages
as charities to distressed labor has been
one of the popular communistic heresies,
demagogues in America whose speech and
action DRIFT in the direction of roofing
such errors firmly IN the ignorant mind
and urging it into fanatical espousai Of
these false and destructive ideas.
OF course free government in America
mands from one kind of labor without
conceding it to all, and nothing is truer
than that this government Is not run for
the special benefit of any special class to
the exclusion of all other classes.
This purchasing quiet and peace of
people; this buying leave of q mob to live
was the policy of Napoleon the Third in
France and his imperial experiment of
pretentious paternaIism shuddered at the
first sound of the German cannon, tum-
bled like house of cards at the first prick
Of the German bayonet; the latest warning
ofhistory speaking through terrible events.
When any assemblage of men hercely
offers a government its choice to make
work for them or they will make mischief,
the best remedy is to make them furnish
all the blood they threaten TO shed. When
the Paris mob threatened Louis the Six
teenth he put on the red cap of the Revo-
luton. smiled and bowed right and left;
when the same Paris mob few years later
threatened Napoleon Bonaparte he did
not take off his hat. nor smile and bow
right and left, but opened on the mob with
his cannon until they scattered like sheep.
Louis lost his head, while Napoleon kept
his on his shoulders.
Communism is the natural child of pater-
nalism, like that of France under Napoleon
the Third. where the whole business of the
state was organized on the superstition that
no man knows his own interest or In fit to
take care of himself. Prohibition is in
principle an illustration of the drift to
paternalism in America, and the philoso-
ply of the Farmers Alliance is instinct
with this same kind of paternalism which
insists that it is the business of the gov
eminent TO support and take care of the
people, instead of the people supporting
and taking care of the government.
This passion for ignoring the free wor k
ing of the natural laws of society by SUBJ
stituting an artificial for q natural gauge
is worthy of the political philosophers so
mirthfully satirized in the first decade of
the eighteenth century by Swift in "GulE-
ver's Travels" but is notcomplimentary to
the common sense of the last decade of
the nineteenth century after the collapse
of so many identical political, social and
industrial fire balloons launched by incap-
able enthusiasts, who amuse, if they do
not annoy or alarm, their day and genera
ton by their ceaseless dropping of buck
cts into empty wells and drawing moth
ing up"
The genuine American workingman, in
distinction from the professional 'jaw-
smith" is naturally impatient of all this
paternalism in government. He believes
that governments govern best which
govern least" that the best government
is that which encourages the highest
development of individualism among the
people and the least paternalism in the
government.