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Suppose that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction, except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell left free to follow its own "interests," and laissez-faire lord of all, what would become of the body physiological?
If the progressive had to ask himself, like the Chinaman in the joke, what he wanted to do with the time he saved by breaking the record, if the advocate of laissez-faire had to contemplate not only free and exuberant energies of men, but what some people call their human nature, if the collectivist let the center of his attention be occupied with the problem of how he is to secure his officials, if the imperialist dared to doubt his own inspiration, you would find more Hamlet and less Henry the Fifth.
Seeing reflected in the life of the city the excesses, the injustice, and the unsoundness of laissez-faire capitalism, she spoke out fearlessly in The Revolution against its abuses, such as the fortunes made out of the low wages and long hours of labor, or the Wall Street speculation to corner the gold market, or the efforts to take over the public lands of the West through grants to the transcontinental railroads.
Supply and demand are the formulas according to which the logic of the English bourgeois judges all human life. Hence free competition in every respect, hence the regime of laissez-faire, laissez-aller in government, in medicine, in education, and soon to be in religion, too, as the State Church collapses more and more.
Under the influence of laissez-faire philosophy, each wretched slum-dweller was supposed to be capable, after his ten or twelve hours in the factory, of looking after his own and his children's education, his main-drainage, his risks from infection, and the purity of his food and his water-supply.
To be free to think as one pleases cannot but mean to think as truly as possible, and so to approach as closely as possible to what others also tend to think. But a larger importance attaches to that mild variety of anarchism which is commonly called laissez-faire, and which Matthew Arnold calls British Atheism or Quietism.
This may hold true even of a trade union or a sense of "fair wages." The business of economic theory is not to justify a regime of laissez-faire, still less to show the folly of bringing morals into business. Its value is rather that it may help us, by improving our understanding, to shape our institutions, and to adopt our moral sentiments so as to promote the public welfare.
In this Æsthetics and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn; and as England was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal middle-class regime, with its belief in laissez-faire and in supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin was not a little pooh-poohed.
'You are doing nothing to remedy it, because there is nothing you are in a position to do. You are merely "standing by," as sailors say, from sentimental motives. It is laissez-faire, of a sort; only, it's an infernally painful and wearing sort for you. It reduces your life to something like her own, without, so far as I can see, benefiting her in the least. I think the police could do as well.
Laissez-faire and the Manchester school had taught him that "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost" was the universal law of life; and he had accepted it, because there seemed nothing else that he could do.
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