will always be powerful enough. But to limit the strife-to fix a ring around the prize-fight-to protect the vital parts from the blows of the combatants. Individual growth can only take place in competition. But it is not necessary that failure in competition should be mortal. The struggle of competition is to go on. But it is not to go on to the death. Economic society is to be converted into a gigantic Trade Union, based upon the belief that the highest good of the individual can only be secured in coöperation with his fellows, and limiting his freedom only in so far as it is necessary to secure freedom to his associates.

57. Laissez-Faire in Practice21

BY L. T. HOBHOUSE

In the main, the teaching of the school tended to a restricted view of the function of government. Government had to maintain order, to restrain men from violence and fraud, to hold them secure in person and property against foreign and domestic enemies, that they might rely upon reaping where they had sown, and might enjoy the fruits of their industry.

The factory system early brought matters to a head at one point by the systematic employment of women and young children under conditions which outraged the public conscience when they became known. In the case of children it was admitted that the principle of free contract could not apply. It left the child to be exploited by the employer in his own interest. But this principle admitted of great extension. If the child was helpless, was the grown-up person, man or woman, in a much better position? Here was the owner of a mill employing five hundred hands. Here was an operative possessed of no alternative means of subsistence seeking employment. Suppose them to bargain as to terms. If the bargain failed the employer lost one man. At worst he might have a little difficulty for a day or two in working a single machine. During the same days the operative might have nothing to eat, and might see his children going hungry. Where was the effective liberty in such an arrangement? In the matter of contract true freedom postulates substantial equality between the parties. In proportion as one party is in a position of advantage he is able to dictate the terms. In proportion as the other party is in a weak position, he must accept unfavorable terms. Hence the truth of Walker's dictum that economic injuries tend to perpetuate them

21 Adapted from Liberalism, 81-101. Copyright by Henry Holt & Co. (1911).

selves. For purposes of legislation the state began with the child, where the case was overwhelming. It went on to include the young person and the woman. It drew the line at the adult male, and it is only within our own time that legislation has avowedly undertaken the task of controlling the conditions of industry. To this it has been driven by the manifest teachings of experience that liberty. without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid result.

In place of the system of unfettered agreement contemplated. the industrial system which has actually grown up and is in process of further development rests on conditions prescribed by the state. The law provides for the safety of the worker and sanitary conditions of employment. It prescribes the length of the working day for women and children. In the future it will probably deal freely with the hours for men. It makes employers liable for injuries suffered by operatives. Within these limits it allows freedom of contract.

The theory of laissez-faire asumed that the state would hold the ring. It would suppress force and fraud, keep property safe, and aid men in enforcing contracts. On these conditions men should be absolutely free to compete with each other, so that their best energies should be called forth. But why, on these conditions, just these, and no others? Why should the State insure protection of person and property? The time was when the strong man armed kept his goods, and incidentally his neighbor's goods too, if he could get hold of them. Why should the State intervene to do for a man that which his ancestors did for themselves? Why should a man who has been soundly beaten in physical fight go to a public authority for redress? How much more manly to fight his own battle. Was it not a kind of pauperization to make men secure in person and property, through no efforts of their own, by the agency of a state machinery operating over their heads? Would not a really consistent individualism abolish this machinery? "But," the advocate of laissez-faire may reply, "the use of force is criminal, and the state must suppress crime." So men held in the ninteenth century. But there was an earlier time when they did not take this view, but left it to individuals and their kinsfolk to revenge their own injuries. Was not this a time of more unrestrained individual liberty. On what principle then is the line drawn, so as to specify certain injuries which the State may prohibit and to mark off others which it must leave untouched?

Individualism as ordinarily understood, not only takes the policeman and the law court for granted. It also takes the rights of property for granted. But what is meant by the rights of property?

In ordinary use the phrase means just that system to which long usage has accustomed us. This is a system by which a man is free to acquire by any method of production or exchange, within the limits of the law, whatever he can of land, consumable goods, or capital; to dispose of it at his own will and pleasure for his own. purposes, to destroy it if he likes, to give it away or sell it as it suits him, and at death to bequeath it to whomsoever he will. The State can take a part of a man's property by taxation. But in all taxation the State is taking something from a man which is "his," and in so doing is justified only by necessity. In many ways, in the face of actual conditions, the individualist has been driven to a change in property rights in the direction of greater social control. The school of Henry George, individualists though they be, would purge the social system of the private ownership of land. This alone, say they, will insure genuine freedom to all individuals.

Thus individualism, when it grapples with the facts, is driven no small distance towards state regulation. Once again we have found that to maintain individual freedom and equality we have to extend the sphere of social control. We cannot assume any of the rights of property as axiomatic. We must look at their actual workings and consider how they affect the life of society.

58. A Program of Social Reform22

BY WOODROW WILSON

We see that in many things our national life is very great. It it incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprises of groups of men.

It is great, also, very great, in its moral force. Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope.

We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance.

But the evil has come with the good, and much of the fine gold has been corroded.

"Adapted from the Inaugural Address, March 4, 1913.

With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful as well as admirably efficient.

We have been proud of our industriál achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives sniffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen piteously the years through.

The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes.

The great government we love has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes; and those who used it had forgotten the people.

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been, "Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. But we were very restless and in a hurry to be great.

We have now come to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.

We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought to be altered, and here are some of the chief items:

A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests;

A banking and currency system based upon the necessity of the government to sell its bonds fifty years ago, and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits;

And industrial system which, take it on all its sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading strings, restricts the

liberties, and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country.

A body of agricultural activities never yet given the efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm or afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs.

Watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing, without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine.

We have studied as perhaps no other nation has the most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or economy as we should either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals.

Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice.

There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.

Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep. sound the society it serves.

Sanitary laws, pure food laws and laws determining conditions. of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency.

These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right.

We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto. And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a sol