The ideal of individualism.  The individualistic, or laissez-faire, ideal dates perhaps from Rousseau and the French doctrinaires; its best-known representatives in English speech are Mill and Spencer.  Dewey and Tufts have pithily expressed it as follows:  “The moral end of political institutions and measures is the maximum possible freedom of the individual consistent with his not interfering with like freedom on the part of other individuals."[Footnote:  Ethics, p. 483.] Its leading arguments may be presented and answered, summarily, as follows: 

(1) Legislation has so often been mischievous that it is well to have as little of it as possible.  The masses are uneducated, the prey of impulse and passion; politics are corrupt; to submit the genius of free entrepreneurs to the clumsy and ill-fitted yoke of a popularly wrought legal control is to stifle their enterprise and interfere with their chances of success.  After all, every one knows his own needs best; and if we leave people alone, they will secure their own welfare better than if we try to dictate to them how they shall seek it.  “Out of the fourteen thousand odd acts which, in our own country, have been repealed, from the date of the Statute of Merton down to 1872 . . . how many have been repealed because they were mischievous? . . .  Suppose that only three thousand of these acts were abolished after proved injuries had been caused, which is a low estimate.  What shall we say of these three thousand acts which have been hindering human happiness and increasing human misery; now for years, now for generations, now for centuries?"[Footnote:  H. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, part iv, sec. 131.] But to admit that much legislation has been blundering is not to admit that the principle of social control is wrong.  Our political system must, indeed, be made must be placed in the way of overhasty and ill-considered lawmaking.  But it is not always true that the individual is the best judge of his own ultimate interests; and it is demonstrably untrue that the pursuit by each of what he deems best for himself will bring the greatest happiness for all.  The stronger and more favorably situated will take advantage of their position and resources; the weaker, though theoretically free, will in reality be under the handicap of poverty, ignorance, hunger.  Such a system is inevitably vicious in its moral effects.  To say that in a popular government legislation cannot properly standardize practice, cannot formulate a higher code of public morality than men can be depended upon to attain if unrestrained, is unwarrantably to discredit democracy.  If the laws are bad, improve them.  If the public is uneducated, educate it.  If our system gives us poor lawmakers, change the system.  But to give up the attempt at legal control, to leave things as they are or rather, to leave them to go from bad to worse, is unthinkable.