will make sure that their operation shall be for the equal benefit of the entire community. The public-school system has not only extended over the whole Nation, as it did not at first, but has undertaken all forms of education from the kindergarten to the university, and is accompanied by public libraries in practically all centres of population. The public health is seen to be something more than the health of individuals, or, at least, it is seen that the health of individuals cannot be secured by individualistic enterprise. We have, therefore, Health Boards, beginning in our great cities, extending throughout our States, and now, unless I am greatly mistaken, soon to be organized in a bureau of the Federal Government, for the purpose of compelling obedience to sanitary law and stamping out epidemics. Even our amusements and recreations are made a public concern, and in our cities, towns, and even smaller villages, parks are provided, playgrounds for the children, and bands of music for the summer evenings. In some cases these are provided by political organizations, in others by voluntary organization, but in either case by a common and coöperative effort.

These changes have been accompanied by another change. The increasing complexity of modern civilization forces upon us, whether we

will or no, an increasing complexity in our government. The prime function of government is to protect persons and property, and the four fundamental rights of persons and property have never been better defined than in the four moral laws of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. The enforcement of these laws in a modern community with the heterogeneous population which America contains means something very different from the enforcement of these laws in the wilderness, where they were first proclaimed.

The law, Thou shalt not kill, means not only adequate protection of the individual from the assassin or the mob, and of the free laborer from the pistol, the dynamite, or the savage blow of the striking laborer or his ally; it means supervision by the Government of our food-supplies to prevent adulterations perilous to health; protection of the life of little children from the greed which sends them into life-destroying industries; protection of the wives and mothers from insistent demands of industry which destroy their motherhood and rob their children and their husbands of their care and companionship; from the peril to life involved in tenement-house sweat-shops; from the corrupting of our water-supply by turning our

rivers into open sewers; from the carelessness of railway management, which in one year destroyed more lives in America than were destroyed in the Russian army by the Battle of Mukden, the greatest battle of modern times; and from the reckless driving of automobiles, of whose deathlist there is no census. Malice slays our hundreds, greed our thousands, carelessness our tens of thousands. It is the duty of a competent and efficient government to save life from all three of these assassins.

The law, Thou shalt not commit adultery, is not adequately enforced by setting husband or wife free from the marital relation when its law is violated. What havoc in human health, what evils inflicted upon innocent women and children, are due to the violation of this law physicians have long known, and the public is beginning to know. Monsters in human form, such as the grotesque fancies of a Dickens or a Shakespeare creating a Quilp or a Caliban have never equaled, exist in American society, carrying on a white slave trade so horrible in its details that reputable men and women have been unable to believe that it could be true. Nor will our Government, Federal or State, have fulfilled its duty in the enforcement of this primitive legislation, Thou shalt not commit adultery, until our legislators realize, as they

have not in the past, how openly it is violated and how great is the almost epidemic evil which such violations inflict upon the Nation.

Thou shalt not steal, means thou shalt not take from thy neighbor without giving him a just equivalent; it means protection of the ignorant from the wiles of the professional gambler; protection of the innocent and helpless stockholder from the chicanery of the stock gambler; protection of the insured and of the bank depositor from the tricks and devices of the dishonest financier; protection of the owners from the schemes of the railway wrecker; and the protection of the public interest in the public property from the shrewd devices of men who are eager to acquire wealth without the labor of producing it.

The law, Thou shalt not bear false witness, means prosecution and punishment of the press which violates this law, whether it does so with malicious intent or from mere careless moneymaking greed. The freedom of the press no more means freedom to do what one likes with his pen than freedom of action means that he may do what he likes with his hand. If I put my hand into my neighbor's pocket and abstract his purse, I am presently carried off to the police station, because I have violated my neighbor's right of property; if I use my pen to vilify my neighbor,

or, with absolute carelessness of his rights and my obligations, print untrue and sensational gossip about him, I ought to go into the same prisonhouse and occupy the same cell with him who has robbed his neighbor of his purse. A newspaper has no more right to despoil one of his reputation than a thief has a right to despoil one of his property. The robber of reputation is the more despicable criminal of the two. Freedom of the press means that the newspaper may print what it will without submitting beforehand its matter to a governmental censor. It does not mean that it may print what it will without being responsible afterwards for its falsehoods if it prints what is not true.

Thus in two ways the function of government has greatly increased within the last century. It has increased because the elementary rights of men are more complex in our complex civilization, and the laws for their protection must therefore be more complex. It has also increased because we have discovered that many of our fundamental rights, such as our right to go from one part to another of our Republic, our right to be preserved from the contagious disease of a careless neighbor, our right to have our children protected from the corrupting influence of seductive vice, our right to have them given such