g contracts
which involve such burdens can be enforced so far as the community
appreciates the evil of such contracts. So, to a certain extent, weakness
from ignorance may be protected by any method that tends to remove the
cause of weakness. All such action of government must be carefully guarded
against becoming such a protection as will render the weak weaker.

_Public responsibility._--The organization of community is best for the
mass of the people when all desires are allowed to give their proper
impulse to action, and when every enterprise is encouraged by freedom
until it is seen to infringe upon the general welfare. Any system of
government which checks natural impulses and hinders individual
enterprise, without clear evidence that all must suffer from such freedom,
is harmful. The genuine application of the phrase "laissez faire" is in
giving honest efforts free course, because these efforts secure the
largest good. It really means, leave humanity free until injury is
attempted. In general, government has to deal with all necessities which
are identical throughout the community. Provision for those necessities
and those only it is bound to make.

All questions of nationalization of industries or of community consumption
must be brought to the test of universal need. What the whole community
wants the whole community has a right to provide in the way which brings
most good with least expenditure of exertion in any form. No other
question can outweigh in importance this one of public need or public
welfare. Every producer and every consumer is interested in seeing that
such welfare is not overlooked by the public, or infringed upon by any
individual or combination of individuals in his community. This must be
done by emphasizing personal responsibility, even in public enterprises.
For the statement is beyond dispute, that the attempt to substitute
corporate responsibility for personal responsibility ends in no
responsibility at all. Above all things it is necessary to remember that
all the progress yet made from the starvation and degradation of barbarism
has been by organized interest of the whole community in protecting first
individual life, second individual liberty, and third individual property,
as the foundation of universal welfare. Yet society holds all these rights
of individuals subject to the same higher law of welfare by restricting
the purpose of individuals when possible, and action always, if it