relations of employer and employé which need to be regulated by
compromise and treaty. There are sanitary precautions which need to be
taken in factories and houses. There are precautions against fire which
are necessary. There is care needed that children be not employed too
young, and that they have an education. There is care needed that
banks, insurance companies, and railroads be well managed, and that
officers do not abuse their trusts. There is a duty in each case on the
interested parties to defend their own interest. The penalty of neglect
is suffering. The system of providing for these things by boards and
inspectors throws the cost of it, not on the interested parties, but on
the tax-payers. Some of them, no doubt, are the interested parties, and
they may consider that they are exercising the proper care by paying
taxes to support an inspector. If so, they only get their fair deserts
when the railroad inspector finds out that a bridge is not safe after
it is broken down, or when the bank examiner comes in to find out why a
bank failed after the cashier has stolen all the funds. The real victim
is the Forgotten Man again--the man who has watched his own
investments, made his own machinery safe, attended to his own plumbing,
and educated his own children, and who, just when he wants to enjoy the
fruits of his care, is told that it is his duty to go and take care of
some of his negligent neighbors, or, if he does not go, to pay an
inspector to go. No doubt it is often in his interest to go or to send,
rather than to have the matter neglected, on account of his own
connection with the thing neglected, and his own secondary peril; but
the point now is, that if preaching and philosophizing can do any good
in the premises, it is all wrong to preach to the Forgotten Man that it
is his duty to go and remedy other people's neglect. It is not his
duty. It is a harsh and unjust burden which is laid upon him, and it is
only the more unjust because no one thinks of him when laying the
burden so that it falls on him. The exhortations ought to be expended