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There are extant a few copies of the first volume of a work by Freeman entitled: The History of Federal Government from the beginning of the Achaian League to the disruption of the United States of America in 1861. Mention of the title brings a smile to the faces of most of us, possibly a blush to that of the author; and yet if the date had been advanced about thirty years and for disruption had been substituted centralization -- the title would not have been so misleading after all. Philosophers tell us that the whole man is, in the phenomena of which he is the theater, the cause and the spectator. In this fact lies the difficulty of founding a scientific personal psychology. Much the same thing is true of national psychology, but while all analysis is distinction all distinction is not separation. If, therefore, we discover in ourselves many actions which point in one direction unmistakably, it will not do to reply that we mistake what is accidental for that which is essential. The almost unrebuked and unbroken trend of our legislation is towards centralization and state socialism.

We are no longer on the verge of socialism, we are in it, far advanced in both the principle and practice of what was but a very few years ago an abhorrent doctrine to all Americans. Nothing can explain our tolerance of the present and prospective pension expenditure but socialism of an extreme and dangerous type. It is not formulated as such a movement in the national mind, perhaps not even in the minds of most men who favor it. But no other explanation can be found for our legislative career than the insidious increase of state socialism as a force in the land. Protection, admirable within limits as a means of national growth and the conservation of balance between classes, has gone to lengths which were never contemplated by its early and philosophical advocates. What masquerades to-day under that name is simply the distribution to one class in the community of what belongs to another. The legitimate demands of a well-planned system of internal improvements have been exaggerated into River and Harbor Bills which grow as does nothing else but evil report. The practical politician, as he calls himself, knows that in their current shape they are merely the means of distributing a percentage of the national revenues among henchmen who do not necessarily waste the money, but do use the employment of laborers to influence votes. Nearly successful were the attempts made to parcel out what is the property of the whole country among the people of one section under the name of educational grants. But the climax is reached under a system approaching, not socialism but communism in the pension measures already operative and those which are seriously proposed as possible. Bishop Berkeley's panacea for Ireland was: "Let them be good." Any political system, however vicious, will work, in a way, where citizens have lofty principles and exercise self-restraint. But where thousands and millions of people with neither principle nor self-control are brought under a polity the corner-stone of which is manhood suffrage, the danger is clear. Demagogues struggle to buy votes at any price, trusting in their star, or Jesuitically justifying the means by the end; and more insidious still is the gradual dissemination of the feeling that where civil and political equality are universal, economic and social equality must follow as a corollary. Some curious psychological phenomena are revealed to the close observer of American life.

One of these is the substitution of legality for morality in the minds of vast numbers who lie outside the immediate limits of that educated and polite society within which we are sadly familiar with the idea, "Get wealth, my son, honestly if thou canst, but get wealth." But even the children of honest God-fearing immigrants hold the same view. They are educated in the common schools too often just far enough to have the pride of opinion and fear of the masses without the check-wheel of moral training. Soon comes the discovery that any religion which demands of its adherents a rigid outward observance of ritual is an object of ridicule among their schoolmates, and false pride destroys the hold of ancestral belief. Growing to manhood they lose along with their religious profession the morality which had its sanction in faith. So unconsciously they change the religious sanction for a legal one and pass into the unfortunate mental attitude of the servant who declared to a possible employer that she was neither a Roman Catholic nor a Protestant -- she was an American. Among large numbers of a higher social rank there is the same confusion, but in their case it is largely due to easy good-nature. Holland, the greatest of the late English writers on jurisprudence of a certain school, defines a legal right as that which a man can get without the use of force, i.e., by means of organized public opinion. The natural conclusion then is that whatever desirable thing can be had from whatever source is to be taken if only public opinion does not condemn. It is awkward if the taker land in jail, and in that case of course the means by which he laid hands on others' property are highly reprehensible. But if he escape the condemnation of the courts a large section of society, high or low, receives and secretly admires him. And if legislation, the law of the land, invites thousands to dishonesty why shall not the leaven of legality permeate the whole lump?