“More reasons for pausing are disclosed on observing the wider results produced. Beyond the special effects of each measure taken for artificially curing evils or achieving benefits, there comes a general effect of an unobtrusive but momentous kind.” Every extension of public action limits the sphere for private action; modifies the conceptions of private responsibility and public responsibility; makes further extensions of public responsibility easier: and tends eventually to make them needful, since the more help the more helplessness. Obligations even of primary kinds are willingly transferred by individuals to the community, when the opportunity is given. Witness the history of the Bureau Municipal des Nourrices in Pairs, which has existed for more than a century, at a cost latterly of ?20,000 a year, to assist the bourgeoises in finding wet-nurses – an institution under which the mortality of children has varied from 45 per cent. downwards, and which has been at length abolished (see Medical Times, February, 1876). And if, where parental affection might be expected to resist, such a perversion of normal into abnormal relations between parent and offspring may take place, still more may it take place where the natural resistance to be anticipated is less. Certain sequences of State-teaching now showing themselves among us, may presently have large developments. Already in London there have been set up in connexion with Board-schools, sundry nurseries where infants are taken care of while the elder children are taught their lessons; and, convenient as they are, such school appendages, multiplying, may make public nursing a familiar idea and the care of infants by their mothers a less peremptory obligation. Public feeding, too, has been not only suggested but even effected, though not yet in Board-schools (see Times, May 17th, 1880, where the advantages derived are insisted upon). Some urge that shoeless and ragged children should be provided with clothing by the Parish, that they may be more fit to attend school; and presently, perhaps, some steps in this direction, first small and then large, will be taken. Though at present there seems little fear that the rearing of children will be made a State-business instead of a family-business, which is the logical outcome of the policy, yet the tendency in that direction must increase with the widening of popular power. Every extension of the policy affects at once the type of social organization and the concomitant social sentiments and theories. As fast as there are established by the help of taxes, public libraries, public museums, public gardens, public gas and water supplies, public industrial dwellings, and by and by public railways as well as telegraphy – as fast as there are multiplied, inspectors of schools, of factories, of ships, of mines, of lodging houses, and of multitudinous things down to water-closets and prostitutes – there is strengthened the idea that corporate agency is to do everything and individual agency nothing. The inevitable result is an increasing dissociation of faculty from prosperity; first as realized in experience and then as established in the general belief. The greater the number of benefits provided by public means for all, and the fewer benefits provided by each for himself, the less marked becomes the advantage of merit and the less effort is there to be meritorious. This undiscriminating distribution of aids, as its effects grow familiar, becoming popular with the inferior who form the majority, must tend ever to grow where the majority can get their way by voting or by intimidation – the more so since each generation, habituated to it from childhood, accepts it as the natural order of things and becomes impatient if every suggested good is not provided or evil cured. One who recalls the cry of the Roman populace ‘bread and games,’ may see to what lengths this policy and its concomitant theory may go. Long-established and spreading usage can produce the most perverse ideas. Who, for instance, would have imagined that the State-licensing system under the French despotism would have generated the belief that ‘the right of working is a royal right which the prince can sell and subjects must buy.’ And if thus by a certain social system, the correlative doctrine may be carried to so astonishing an extreme in one direction; so, to an equally astonishing extreme, may another social system carry its correlative doctrine in an opposite direction. In the alleged ‘right to a maintenance out of the soil,’ claimed for each man whatever his conduct, which was the popular dogma under the old Poor-law, we have a conception which, fostered by ever-multiplying public agencies for carrying home benefits to individuals irrespective of labour expended by them, is capable of developing into the conviction that the personal well being of each is a matter not of private concern but of public concern: the manifest limit being absolute communism.
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