Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/79

 Rh of preventive efforts to which it has given rise. As disease and death become costly health and life become valuable.

It also seems as though the forces which enabled labour to secure better conditions for itself are weakening. The industrial combinations of capital are rendering combinations of labour less effective, and even though legislation is beginning to do what trade unions did some years ago and to impose certain standards of hours, conditions and, in certain trades, wages, recent defensive agreements between employers have gone far to restore the economic advantages which capital had when it was bargaining with unorganised labour. In the economic state of nature, there is no freedom of contract between capital and labour, the position of the two being so unequal. Labour combinations went a good way to establish some equality by their common bargaining and by their privileges to declare war and carry it on. But capital can always restore the inequality by following the lead of trade unions, and it is now doing so. The only reply that labour can make is to enter politics. When it did so, however, it immediately met with the censure of the Law Courts, and capital again got possession of its privileged position.

But no responsibility is imposed on any one