contest with the statical class, 379-381.-The problem of industrial INDUSTRIAL LIBERTY CHAPTER I FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS ANY one who attempts a study of economic questions in the light of modern research cannot fail to be impressed, upon the threshold of his inquiry, by the multiplicity and apparent complexity of the data involved in these questions, by the variety and conflicting character of many of the propositions which are suggested for reform, and still more strongly by the absence of any one central and clearly defined principle upon which there can be a substantial agreement. The statisticians and political economists keep too near their facts and figures, and regard their subjects mainly, if not exclusively, as of commercial quality; as related only to the values of labor and production, to capital and wages; as simply involving dollars and cents and the conveniences of trade. The politician approaches them diplomatically, and offers to compromise all difficulties with palliative and merely expedient measures. Many of the writers on economic reform are occupied in confusing causes with effects, and in the endeavor to match one result with another. Meanwhile an impression is more or less prevalent among the people that economic laws have lost their sanction and their character. Under these circumstances a rational course of examination would seem to lie, first, in an effort to indicate precisely and simply the primary qualities of industrial liberty, particularly as related to the American citizen; then to marshal existing social and industrial conditions, in order to measure them by this definition, to discover, if possible, how far they have deviated from it; and thereafter to test, by the same standard, some of the more prominent propositions for reform. Lord Bacon says that it is the "multiplicity of single facts which presents nothing but confusion. The middle principles alone are solid, orderly, and fruitful." By studying these "middle principles" we learn their essential relation to each other, and may also illustrate the degree of congruity or incongruity with these principles which exists in present political and industrial conditions. Following this course, I will first briefly sketch the early progress of the English people towards liberty. Magna Charta has been rather commonly and vaguely regarded as a great charter of liberty. It was, in point of fact, a very imperfect beginning. It came into being as the result of a conflict between governing classes. William Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke, and his associate knights and barons, had scarcely any more perception of the principles of political liberty, in their modern significance, than had King John, from whom the Charter was wrested, and the Charter itself secured but little to the mass of the people. The instrument deserves its prominence in English history, not as the delineation but as the foretokening of liberty. A distinguished writer has said of Magna Charta that "in substance it is the first effort of a corporate life that has reached full consciousness, resolved to act for itself, and able to carry out the resolution." I Even this seems an overstatement. The Charter had but slight effect upon the prevailing law of tenure, and as little upon hereditary establishment. There was thereafter, it is true, a division of the mastership, which had for some time before been tending towards unity in the person of the absolute king. In consequence of this division, feudal oppression began to be somewhat relaxed; but for all that the vassal was the vassal still.. Of all the seventy-nine clauses of the Charter, only one is intended to protect the working people, and this merely secured to them, from unjust seizure, their "wainage," or farming implements. During the succeeding reign, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, called into being the House of Commons. This was really a far more important ad 1 Stubbs' "Constitutional History of England," N. Y., 1880, vol. I., p. 610. |