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individual specially interested in performing them, nor would any adequate remuneration naturally or spontaneously attend their performance. Take for instance a voyage of geographical or scientific exploration. It may be said, generally, that anything which it is desirable should be done for the general interests of mankind or of future generations, or for the present interests of those members of the community who require external aid, but which is not of a nature to remunerate individuals or associations for undertaking it, is in itself a suitable thing to be undertaken by government.

The preceding heads comprise, to the best of my judgment, the whole of the exceptions to the practical maxim that the business of society can be best performed by private and voluntary agency. It is, however, necessary, to add, that the intervention of government cannot always practically stop short at the limit which defines the cases intrinsically suitable for it. In the particular circumstances of a given age or nation, there is scarcely any thing, really important to the general interest, which it may not be desirable, or even necessary, that the government should take upon itself. Even in the best state which society has yet reached it is lamentable to think how great a proportion of all the efforts and talents in the world are employed in merely neutralizing one another. It is the proper end of government to reduce this wretched waste to the smallest possible amount, by taking such measures as shall cause the energies now spent by mankind in injuring one another, or in protecting themselves against injury, to be turned to the legitimate employment of the human faculties, that of compelling the powers of nature to be more and more subservient to physical and moral good.

The Authoritative Basis of Laissez-Faire

There is nothing novel in the assertion that deference to authority is the most persistent and fundamental of the many aspects of the intellectual attitude, laissez-faire. True it is that the expression carries the idea of an industrial regime going its way, untrammeled by state interference. In fact its most obvious meaning seems to be a policy under which the individual shall be legally free to select his own occupation, choose his own business associates, employ an industrial technique and organization which is to his own liking, and buy his materials and labor and market his wares on terms voluntarily made. Thus it means freedom for the individual in the immediate conduct of his business and the sale of his wares. But it does not totally exclude authority. Many advocates of laissez-faire see nothing amiss in governmental grants of public

lands, subsidies, patents, or franchises. Many would permit the state to levy customs duties intended to check importations, raise prices, and increase the number of those engaged in protected industries. All would allow the state to encourage commerce by improving transportation and credit facilities. It is perhaps not an overstatement to say that the advocate of laissez-faire regards as interference, not all political activity affecting industry, but only such as adversely affects business interests.

Instances such as the above, however, are only passing phases of the situation. Penetrating and conditioning industrial activity at every point there is a tangled web of legal, political and social institutions. Among the legal institutions are the prohibition of physical violence in industrial activity, a recognition of private property rights, machinery for compelling the discharge of obligations voluntarily assumed, and prescribed forms for partnerships and corporations. Among the social institutions are a system of intangible and immaterial property rights, the manifestations of public and class opinion, a code of business ethics, and a system of collective action and the recognition of collective authority in individual industrial establishments. Upon these the advocate of laissez-faire of necessity takes an attitude. Since these institutions change slowly and are conceived of as indispensible, they have generally been regarded by the business man as a part of the unchangeable nature of things. Therefore laissez-faire formally says nothing about them. Yet its very silence is the best evidence of its unqualified approval of habitual legal and social institutions and its demand that the individual he hedged about with conventional authority.

Not only is the province from which authority is excluded a narrow one, but even in that province laissez-faire is conceived of as a mere means for securing some desirable social end. Neither theorist nor layman, in formulating his reasons for supporting this policy, declares himself in favor of a purely acquisitive system, wherein the strong shall wax stronger at the expense of the weak. By the older school, whose aspirations for society were democratic, it was argued that the competitive struggle, under laissez-faire, resulted in the greatest good, not only to the highly successful few, but to every member of the social community. By the newer school the basis of whose theories is biological, and whose ideal is aristocratic, its justification is found in the elimination of the unfit, the perpetuation of the fit, and the tendency of society towards. a higher cultural level. By some of the latter charity is strongly condemned, not because it strips the fit of some of the

earnings which the industrial struggle has brought him, but because the survival of dependants tends to lower the prevailing type of civilization. Into the merits of these theories this is not the place to go. Here it is enough to note that even its most extreme advocates do not conceive of laissez-faire as a theory of predation, nor seek to justify it by any benefits, however great, which it may confer on the individual. On the contrary, over and above him, a conscious social end is set up, to the realization of which his activities must tend, and in view of which the policy itself is to be approved or condemned.

51. The Unscientific Character of Laissez-Faire13

BY J. E. CAIRNES

Political Economy has to do with wealth. But what is the problem concerning wealth which it undertakes to solve? I think the prevailing notion is that it undertakes to show that wealth may be most rapidly increased and most fairly distributed, by the simple process of leaving people to follow the promptings of self-interest unrestrained either by the State or by public opinion. That is the doctrine of laissez-faire. I shall endeavor to show that the maxim of laissez-faire has no scientific basis whatever, but is at best a mere handy rule of practice.

If the doctrine of laissez-faire is to be taken as a scientific principle, its implied assertion is this: that, taking human beings as they are, in their intellectual and physical surroundings, and accepting the institution of private property as commonly understood, the promptings of self-interest will lead individuals, in all that range of their conduct which has to do with their material wellbeing, spontaneously to follow that course which is most for their own. good and for the good of all. You will at once see that it involves the two following assumptions: first, that the interests of individuals are fundamentally the same, secondly, that individuals know their interests in the sense in which they are coincident with the interests of others, and that, in the absence of coercion, they will in this sense follow them. If these two propositions be made out, the policy of laissez-faire follows with scientific rigour.

But can they be made out? For my part I am disposed to accept the first one, that human interests, well understood, are fundamentally at one. But how as to this assumption that people know their interests in the sense in which they are identical with the interests

18 Adapted from "Political Economy and Laissez-Faire," in Essays in Political Economy, 240–252 (1873).

of others, and that they spontaneously follow them in this sense? The advocates of laissez-faire usually argue that human interests are naturally harmonious; therefore we have only to leave people free, and social harmony will result; as if it were an obvious thing that people know their interests in the sense in which they coincide with the interests of others, and that knowing them, they must follow them, as if there were no such things in the world as passion, prejudice, custom, esprit de corps, class interest, to draw people aside from the pursuit of their interests in the largest and highest sense! Here is the fatal flaw on the very threshold of the argument. Nothing is easier than to show that people follow their interest, in the sense in which they understand their interest. But between following their interest in this sense and in the sense in which it is coincident with the interests of other people, a chasm yawns. That chasm in the argument of laissez-faire has never been bridged.

To come to the important point, what is it that people understand to be their interests? What did landlords, as a class, understand to be their interests down to 1846, when they maintained the Corn Laws as indispensable to their rents, and the prop of their political power? What do Irish landlords understand to be their interests when they are withheld only by fear of assassination from evicting their tenants to consolidate their estates? What did employers in former days understand to be their interests when they enacted statutes of laborers? Or, in more recent times, when a ten hours' act became necessary to protect women and children against the unscrupulous pursuit of gain? I ask if any one can seriously consider the state of things represented by these examples, and retain absolute confidence in his maxim of laissez-faire?

The truly significant circumstance is that the policy expressed by laissez-faire has been steadily progressive for nearly half a century, and yet we have no sign of mitigation in the harshest features of our social state. Those ugly social features, those violent contrasts of poverty and wealth, that strike so unpleasantly the eye of every foreign observer in this country, are still painfully prominent. In a word, "the grand final result, the indefinite approximation of all classes towards a level which is always rising," seems as yet scarcely nearer. This seems to me to abate our confidence in laissez-faire as the panacea for industrial ills.

There is no evidence to warrant the assumption that lies at the root of this doctrine. Human beings follow their interests according to their delights and dispositions; but not necessarily in that sense. in which the interest of the individual is coincident with that of others or of the whole. It follows that there is no security that the

economic phenomena of society will always arrange themselves spontaneously in the way that is most for the common good. In other words laissez-faire falls to the ground as a scientific doctrine. At best it is a practical rule and not a doctrine of science. Like most other practical rules, it is open to numerous exceptions. Above all, it must never for a moment be allowed to stand in the way of the candid consideration of any promising proposal of social or industrial reform.

E. THE PROTEST AGAINST INDIVIDUALISM

52. The Tyranny of the Machine11

BY JOSEPH HARDING UNDERWOOD

The modern "tripods of Hephaestus"-the spinning jenny, the mule, the loom-instead of serving as allies to human hands, speedily became masters of "hands." The undemocratic idea prevailed— laissez-faire, let me do as I please "me" being a man with a hundred hands, which speedily became a thousand. The use of men, women, and children by factory-owners at the beginning of the nineteenth century had all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of slave ownership. Starvation brought the wives and daughters of the workmen to the factories and, since only their labor and not their strength had to be bought, there was no waste in wearing them out. Half-naked women were harnessed to draw carts in the mines through passages two feet seven inches high; children of seven worked twelve to fourteen hours a day in factories. There were regular traffickers in children of paupers. "In stench, in heated rooms, amidst the constant whirring of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in constant action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness."15 They were fed the same food that the master gave his pigs. Irons were riveted to the ankles and chained to the hips of girls and women to keep them from running away. The suicides, the murdered, and the tired were buried secretly. No such cruelty was ever widespread under slavery. It would not pay.

"Adapted from The Distribution of Ownership, 52-53 (1907). Gibbins, Industry in England, 389.

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