Paternalism in Government
Paternalism in Government.—Thus speaks a reformer in the New York Voice of September 2: “Those who cry out against paternalism in the State, speak as ‘fools and blind.’ Paternalism is the reason and business of government.”—John G. Woolley, in Christian Endeavor and Good Citizenship Department. Those whom Mr. Woolley thus accounts as fools and blind can afford to bide the issue; the logic of oncoming facts will demonstrate that they are right and that the foolish and blind are those who believe the government to be a great big nursing father or mother to dandle and pamper her children, to instruct in morals, to prescribe religion and church, and to take all the God-given manhood out of every son of Adam. It is the old heathen idea. When that, combined with the Roman Catholic idea that “the church” is a mother of both State and people, is crystallized into statute law, we will have reached the climax. Manhood then will be among the martyrs, and civil liberty be a thing of the past. The only reason and business of civil government, according to the true American idea and the Christian idea, is to restrain incivility and guard the equal rights of all, Christian and infidel alike.