the powers and
duties of the State toward labor; for it is preached vehemently by the
employing class.

What makes this look the more serious is, that our political and social
manners are not adapted to it. In Europe, the State is possessed of an
administrative machine which has a finish, efficacy, and permanence
unknown here. Tocqueville comments on its absence among us; and it is,
as all the advocates of civil-service reform know, very difficult to
supply. All the agencies of the government suffer from the imposition on
them of what I may call non-American duties. For instance, a
custom-house organized as a political machine was never intended to
collect the enormous sum of duties which must pass through its hands
under our tariff. A post-office whose master has to be changed every
four years to "placate" Tammany, or the anti-Snappers, or any other body
of politicians, was never intended to handle the huge mass which
American mails have now become. One of the greatest objections to the
income tax is the prying into people's affairs which it involves. No man
likes to tell what his income is to every stranger, much less to a
politician, which our collectors are sure to be. Secrecy on the part of
the collector is in fact essential to reconcile people to it in England
or Germany, where it is firmly established; but our collectors sell
their lists to the newspapers in order to make the contributors pay up.

In all these things, we are trying to meet the burdens and
responsibilities of much older societies with the machinery of a much
earlier and simpler state of things. It is high time to halt in this
progress until our administrative system has been brought up to the
level even of our present requirements. It is quite true that, with our
system of State and federal constitutions laying prohibitions on the
Legislature and Congress, any great extension of the sphere of
government in our time seems very unlikely. Yet the assumption by
Congress, with the support of the Supreme Court, of the power to issue
paper money in time of peace, the power to make prolonged purchases of a
commodity like silver, the power to impose an income tax, to execute
great public works, and to protect native industry, are powers large
enough to effect a great change in the constitution of society and in
the distribution of wealth, such as, it is safe to say, in the present
state of human culture, no government ought to have and exercise.

One he