OR, THE MORMON QUESTION IN ITS ECONOMIC ASPECTS. A STUDY OF CO-OPERATION AND ARBITRATION IN OF A WAGE-WORKER. "That's the most perfect government in which an injury to one is the concern of all." C CHAPTER I. WHAT IS THE MORMON PROBLEM? ESAR'S spirit still stalks the earth. It finds footing in the American, as it did in the Roman republic. Time has but shifted the scenes, not altered the plot, in the historic drama. Having scaled Olympus and brought the gods into unity, its imperial claims will not relax for man. Driven from the church, it sought refuge in the State; the power ecclesiasticism lost, politics gained. The danger to liberty to-day lies not in priestcraft, but in statecraft; not in the enforced obedience of the people to revealed law, but in the enforced obedience to assumed social requirements. Duties are held as individual, rights social, and the individual has to bend before the phantasmal abstraction "society." society." For centuries progress has been toward greater freedom; every extension of liberty has widened the sphere of personal freedom In America, legislation is apparently tending toward greater restriction. Fifty years ago many of our present legislative schemes would have been impossible. "The American Idea" of that day was-" the best government is that which governs least;' hence men looked with jealousy on encroachments on individual rights. In fact, the essence of government was supposed to be protection to individual rights, that only in the extension of personal freedom could there be social freedom. Or, as expressed by one of the revolutionary heroes, Thomas Paine: If we are asked what government is, we hold it to be nothing more than a national association, and we hold that to be the best which secures to every man his rights, and promotes the greatest quantity of happiness with the least expense. Man's natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. * * Why this eddy in the stream of progress; this apparent drift to force and strong government; " this rejuvenance of Cæsar's ghost, urging centralization and reliance on might? The answer is plainly to be seen. . The spirit of Cæsar, rendered powerless in religious systems, castrated of divine right in forms of political government, is entrenching itself in the economic system of the age. British and German empires, Spanish and Italian kingdoms, French and American republics, are but dead forms, survivals |