all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the
past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit,
fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in
political economy and social science. It is a fact worth noticing, just
when there seems to be a revival of faith in legislative agencies, that
our States are generally providing against the experienced evils of
over-legislation by ordering that the Legislature shall sit only every
other year. During the hard times, when Congress had a real chance to
make or mar the public welfare, the final adjournment of that body was
hailed year after year with cries of relief from a great anxiety. The
greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in
undoing the work of statesmen in the past, and the greatest difficulty
in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without
injury to what is natural and sound. All this mischief has been done
by men who sat down to consider the problem (as I heard an apprentice
of theirs once express it), What kind of a society do we want to make?
When they had settled this question _a priori_ to their satisfaction,
they set to work to make their ideal society, and today we suffer the
consequences. Human society tries hard to adapt itself to any
conditions in which it finds itself, and we have been warped and
distorted until we have got used to it, as the foot adapts itself to an
ill-made boot. Next, we have come to think that that is the right way
for things to be; and it is true that a change to a sound and normal
condition would for a time hurt us, as a man whose foot has been
distorted would suffer if he tried to wear a well-shaped boot. Finally,
we have produced a lot of economists and social philosophers who have
invented sophisms for fitting our thinking to the distorted facts.

Society, therefore, does not need any care or supervision. If we can
acquire a science of society, based on observation of phenomena and