ion, and where the enterprise of the people
was inadequate to their improvement, the Government has reached out its
strong arm and redeemed them from their primitive rudeness, thereby
promoting the physical condition, the enlightenment, and the culture of
the people. There are plenty of instances on record, in which
improvements of this kind--of roads, for example--have been made against
the will and in spite of the opposition of the people most to be
benefited thereby; and had they not been related under the same
government to communities more intelligent and enterprising than
themselves, they would have remained in an isolated and semi-barbarous
condition.

Now, while we readily discern the increase in the objects and in the
machinery of government, we cannot so readily discern the abatement of
governmental interference with the private affairs of the individual, as
in governments of longer standing. There has not been time for great
changes in this respect; and then, in the earliest legislation of our
country there was comparatively so little that was obnoxious to
individual freedom, that there has been less occasion for the change in
question. The Blue Laws of Connecticut are proverbial for their
intermeddling with private life. There has been no change in this
respect so marked since the organization of our Government as there was
before; but so far as there has been any, it is in favor of the
exemption of the individual, in ordinary times, from legal interference.
The entire atmosphere of American society is becoming more liberal as
general education advances; and this, in turn, acts upon the legislative
and executive functions of the Government, to make the laws and the
execution of the same more acceptable to a cultured people. The 'Maine
Law,' earnest and benevolent as it was in purpose, and to all seeming so
obviously founded in the right of society to protect itself, could not
be sustained against this tendency in government to let the individual
alone in the affairs of his private life.

We have observed that there is a concentration of different industrial
and commercial functions in different sections of the country, whereby
these sections become dependent upon each other, and the unity of the
whole, to a certain extent, made inevitable. Now, we insist that
political economy and the greatest well-being of all require that the
political jurisdiction should, as far as possible, be commensurate with
that co