Right And Wrong Of Compulsion By The State PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ... Parents who are simply treated as so much material and summarily directed by a law to educate their children can never rise to an intelligent sense of their duties. Our wants, our family and social obligations, are our great moral educators in the world, but they can only do their work so long as we preserve free minds to listen to the moral appeal. The moment we begin to satisfy these wants by the machinery of external compulsion, all the good that would come to us from making the free effort is lost. He who voluntarily sacrifices his own interests to send his child to school is on the road to raise himself and the society to which he belongs, but he who simply pays mechanical obedience to a law, condemns himself, --and all others, as far as his influence is concerned, --to drowse on for ever with unwakened senses.--See appendix. Laws attempting to prevent Vicious Habits.--All coercive interferences with vice end disastrously. They drive it out of the daylight into secret places, where it assumes lower and more degraded forms. They produce great hypocrisy, for none of us are sufficiently virtuous to act as the persecutors of others in these matters. They often inflict great cruelty by putting power into the hands of unfit instruments, a power, for example, so much dreaded in Paris that women have many times destroyed themselves rather than fall into the hands of the police. And, lastly, like all other employments of force, they prevent the growth of moral influence.--See special paper. Laws regulating or forbidding the Liquor Traffic.--There is much to be said on this subject. I can only say here that to forbid this traffic by law will be to destroy almost at a blow the moral energies which have been called out by the great evil of.