Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/320

308 from undertaking works; and the high interest originally obtained on investments, the great profits made by contractors, and the large payments received by engineers, led to that drafting of money, energy, and ability, into railway-making, which rapidly developed our railway-system, to the enormous increase of our national prosperity. But when M. Thiers, then Minister of Public Works, came over to inspect, and having been taken about by Mr. Vignoles, said to him when leaving:—"I do not think railways are suited to France," there resulted from the consequent policy of hindering free contract, a delay of "eight or ten years" in that material progress which France experienced when railways were made.

What do all these facts mean? They mean that for the healthful activity and due proportioning of those various industries, professions, etc. which maintain and aid the life of a society, there must, in the first place, be no restrictions on men's liberties to make agreements with one another, and there must, in the second place, be an enforcement of the agreements which they do make. As we have seen, the checks naturally arising to each man's actions when men become associated, are those only which result from mutual limitation; and there consequently can be no resulting check to the contracts they voluntarily make: interference with these is interference with those rights to free action which remain to each when the rights of others are fully recognized. And then, as we have seen, enforcement of their rights implies enforcement of contracts made; since breach of contract is indirect aggression. If, when a customer on one side of the counter asks a shopkeeper on the other for a shilling's worth of his goods, and, while the shopkeeper's back is turned, walks off with the goods without leaving the shilling he tacitly contracted to give, the case differs in no essential way from robbery. Similarly, if analyzed, every breach of contract proves to be a case in which the individual injured is deprived of something he possessed, without receiving the equivalent something bargained for; and is in the condition of having expended his labor without getting benefit—has had an essential condition to the maintenance of life infringed.

Thus, then, it results that to recognize and enforce the rights of individuals, is at the same time to recognize and enforce the conditions to a normal social life. There is one vital requirement for both.

Before turning to those corollaries which have practical applications, let us observe how the special conclusions drawn converge to the one general conclusion originally foreshadowed—glancing at them in reversed order.

We have just found that the prerequisite to individual life is in a double sense the prerequisite to social life. The life of a society in