LAW AND LIBERTY.
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ment and a disregard of this all-important purpose is simply suicide. No people can lead a long existence trained and kept in any narrow channel. Athens fell because of an unwise and tenacious adherence to art at the expense, among her native population, of the practical side of life. America, with her few holidays and fewer legitimate amusements, can easily pave the way to ruin by neglecting the methods of lifting the burdens from the hearts of her naturally noble workers. The laboring man so situated that he can afford it, spends no time more profitably than in reading good books or in some healthy amusement or diversion. Pleasure helps him to do his work better. But labor has always been, and always will be, compelled to work for wages little more than sufficient to provide the necessaries of life to the exclusion of even the lesser luxuries, and by no concerted effort of its own can it even attain the independence required to enjoy these almost necessary luxuries. Provision for the higher welfare of the laboring classes can come from no other source but the State and Nation. It is no gift, but a means of self-preservation.
A nation free from debt could in no better way instill into its people intelligence, and broad-minded national dignity, and root out the selfishness and disrespect of others rights which comes from hard, monotonous toil productive enough to barely sustain life, than by adopting some wise system of State patronage. Let it teach them that the Nation cares for them, that the welfare of every citizen is considered. This is true State patronage, better than government railroads and telegraphs, better than legislation against corporations. The laboring classes will be educated by the libraries, their hearts lightened amusements, their paths smoothed by innocent pleasures, their lives eased from insanity-producing toil. More and better work will be accomplished; and could we lift the veil of a hundred years and see a joyous, light-hearted, free and contented people enjoying pleasant homes, free from socialistic ideas, no longer having a nation's poor, made at last a true nation—a pure democracy, who would now be so selfish, so short-sighted as to oppose State patronage.
LAW AND LIBERTY.
HOWARD T. SMITH, LAW DEPARTMENT, MOUND CITY, KANSAS.
LAW in its best sense—and in that I would use it—"is a rule of human action or conduct," "a solemn expression of the legislative will." Liberty-civil liberty—the liberty of the English-speaking race-"is a restraint from the arbitrary will of others." Law assures the free exercise of liberty. An enlightened sense of liberty shapes the form of law. They are identical, inseparable, one, from the standpoint of civilized institutions. Each aids the other in its full development. Each gives the foothold by which the other gains ascendant stations. Each is the light, life and strength of the other.
Law is associated with the judge, the jury, the sheriff, the prison, all, perhaps.
the seeming antagonists of liberty, though its true guardians. Liberty is like free flowing waters, springing grasses, blooming flowers, that come and go, apparently unrestrained, unquestioned. We think not of the law that governs them—that checks them while in the luxuriance of their life-checks them that they may meet the duties of to-morrow as well as live the pleasures of to-day. We think not that they find law in nature, a judge in God, a jury in the seasons, that weigh the facts and shape the trend of usefulness, a shoerriff in the frost that arrests a too fulsome life, a prison in winter's months. Yet we sometimes say that law is opposed to liberty, that nature affords a perfect picture of