ts
common basis, and can leave the latter for individual growth.

_Government wards._--The welfare of the whole reaches finally to a
guardianship over such individuals in the community as endanger, either by
weakness or by wickedness, that welfare. For this reason government can
maintain asylums for the weak or diseased, or even the extremely ignorant,
not simply to protect these individuals, perhaps not chiefly for that
purpose, but to protect the whole. It can rightly and wisely enforce such
protection by health regulations and officers, and by truant laws and
officials. Upon this principle it may rightly constrain even the friends
of insane persons to give up control of the insane to the safer public
provision in asylums. When any community realizes a similar need with
reference to inebriates, it will assume the same constraining authority.

In dealing with the problem of personal wickedness, a community must still
draw the line between universal and individual welfare. The criminal
injures all; therefore all must constrain him, and effort is made to
measure that constraint by the evidence of opposition to public welfare.
Vices are more distinctly individual. They touch the universal welfare in
those forms which propagate vice in neighborhoods. Governments universally
fail to enforce laws against personal vices wherever the danger to upright
character in other persons is not clearly perceived. All restrictive
legislation upon vicious habits, like intemperance, gambling or other
immoral practices, is naturally aimed first at the places contrived to
foster such habits, and therefore to attack the innocent. The actual
working of such legislation in preventing the growth of vice is the only
final test of its wisdom. What it _can_ do is what it _ought_ to do. In
general the actual public sentiment in local communities must be the main
dependence for executing such laws.

_Protection of the weak._--The common statement that government must
protect the weak against the strong is subject to the same principle of
universal welfare, and is applicable only where society has definitely
recognized rules of good order which somebody is violating. Any attempt to
supply to the weak a strength which they cannot wield is necessarily a
failure. But society as a whole rightly shields children and youth, and
even women of mature years, from burdens which may injure the general
health or wisdom or virtue of the community. Laws prohibitin