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If nothing in the world is more heavy than your formal banquet, nothing, on the other hand, is more agreeable than those well-chosen laissez aller feasts at which the guests are as happily selected as the wines; where there is no form, no reserve, no effort; and people having met to sit still for a few hours are willing to be as pleasant to each other as if they were never to meet again.

It remained to be seen whether the victors would attempt to study and meet the complaints of the farmer and the wage earner; whether the new Republican leaders would be able to preserve the laissez faire attitude toward the railroads and the corporations; and whether the forces of dissent represented in Populism and radical Democracy had received a death blow or only a rebuff.

Grave social injustices have been done, though often in good faith, since the lawyer, by training and experience, has hitherto been least open to the teachings of the new social science, has been an honest advocate of the system of 'laissez faire'. But to say that the American legal profession is without ideals and lacking in the emulative spirit would be to do it a grave injustice.

In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early, or laissez faire School of Political Economy. It was too much inclined to say to men: 'You are the puppets of certain natural laws. Your own freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist merely as a dangerous disease.

This slight sketch will suffice to mark the leading features of a large class of laws which must be regarded as a growth of State socialism. The following points deserve special attention These measures are all forced on Parliament by the recognition of actual grievances, and all are testimony to the failure of a system of complete laissez faire.

I had taken up another sheet to say something more, I know not what; but the appearance of a fine sheep's-head smoking on the table has attractions not to be resisted. Laissez moi diner, "and then," &c. Madame j'ais bien diner, and j'ai fait mettre mon writing-desk sur le table a diner. La pauvre Celeste. Adieu. Frederica, St. Simon's, September 15, 1804.

The word individualism was used by the present writer in a series of articles entitled "The Ethics of Democracy," beginning in 1887, as the most convenient term for describing that state of society where the greatest possible individual liberty is conjoined with a strong recognition of the right of private property, substantially the laissez faire school as it existed in England in the first half of the last century; "the distinction between communistic and socialistic laws being, that the former are concerned solely with the taking or redistribution of money or property; the latter regulate or prohibit men's mode of life, acts, or contracts, either among themselves or as concerning the state."

I then told him how much I should be obliged by his doing so, as I had been commissioned to deliver the things, and if I was made to pay for them, the loss would be more serious than I could bear. "Bah! bah!" exclaimed he. "Laissez moi faire! Laissez moi faire!"

Other obstacles to the overthrow of the rule of laissez faire were the vested interests of over-mighty manufacturers and landlords in the maintenance of that anarchy which is the logical extreme of Liberty and Property; and such elementary measures of humanity as the Factory Acts were long resisted by men so humane as Cobden and John Bright as arbitrary interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage.

Their common influence is the discouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of the existing state. Both converge in practice upon laissez faire. I would therefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives, and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely in systematised purpose.