Experience is of no account, neither is history, nor tradition, nor the accumulated wisdom of ages.  On all questions of political economy, finance, morals, the ignorant man stands on a par with the best informed as a legislator.  We might cite any number of the results of these illusions.  A member of a recent House of Representatives declared that we “can repair the losses of the war by the issue of a sufficient amount of paper money.”  An intelligent mechanic of our acquaintance, a leader among the Nationals, urging the theory of his party, that banks should be destroyed, and that the government should issue to the people as much “paper money” as they need, denied the right of banks or of any individuals to charge interest on money.  Yet he would take rent for the house he owns.

Laws must be the direct expression of the will of the majority, and be altered solely on its will.  It would be well, therefore, to have a continuous election, so that, any day, the electors can change their representative for a new man.  “If my caprice be the source of law, then my enjoyment may be the source of the division of the nation’s resources.”—­[Stahl’s Rechtsphilosophie, quoted by Roscher.]

Property is the creator of inequality, and this factor in our artificial state can be eliminated only by absorption.  It is the duty of the government to provide for all the people, and the sovereign people will see to it that it does.  The election franchise is a natural right—­a man’s weapon to protect himself.  It may be asked, If it is just this, and not a sacred trust accorded to be exercised for the benefit of society, why may not a man sell it, if it is for his interest to do so?

What is there illogical in these positions from the premise given?  “Communism,” says Roscher, [Political Economy, bk. i., ch. v., 78.]—­is the logically not inconsistent exaggeration of the principle of equality.  Men who hear themselves designated as the sovereign people, and their welfare as the supreme law of the state, are more apt than others to feel more keenly the distance which separates their own misery from the superabundance of others.  And, indeed, to what an extent our physical wants are determined by our intellectual mold!”

The tendency of the exaggeration of man’s will as the foundation of government is distinctly materialistic; it is a self-sufficiency that shuts out God and the higher law.—­["And, indeed, if the will of man is all-powerful, if states are to be distinguished from one another only by their boundaries, if everything may be changed like the scenery in a play by a flourish of the magic wand of a system, if man may arbitrarily make the right, if nations can be put through evolutions like regiments of troops, what a field would the world present for attempts at the realizations of the wildest dreams, and what a temptation would be offered to take possession, by main force, of the government of human affairs, to destroy the rights of property and