Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/797

Rh with the results which the invention of labor-saving machinery promised to fulfill. "It was expected that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past." For the first time in the history of the world the niggardliness of Nature seemed to have been overcome, and it appeared possible for man to produce enough to satisfy all his wants. The cry of "overproduction," now so generally heard, lends some color to this view. Yet it is susceptible of mathematical proof that if the whole production of the civilized world could be distributed equally among all the inhabitants thereof, it would not raise any of them to affluence or rid them of the necessity of close economy and of hard, continuous labor. This disappointment with Nature does not, however, wholly account for existing sentiment in regard to the distribution of wealth. There is still a residuum to be explained.

The fundamental principle upon which social intercourse rests is that of equal freedom, or the right of "every man to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man." Certain conditions are necessary to social well-being, and this equality of freedom is essential, so that men's characters may be wrought into harmony with these necessary conditions. It is upon this right to equal freedom that the right to property rests: indeed, the two rights are regarded as synonymous. "The legitimacy of private property has, since the time of Locke, been based by the greater number of political economists on the right inherent in every workman either to consume or to save the product of his labor," that is to say, on the freedom to do as he wills with his own, provided he does not infringe upon the equal right of others to do the same. Furthermore, it is a logical deduction from the principle of freedom that every man is entitled to claim as his own the fruits of his labor and his savings, for this principle requires not that all shall share alike, but that each shall have like freedom to pursue and acquire the object of his desires.

Beyond the restraints which the law of equal freedom itself imposes, there are other secondary restraints which are necessary to right living. Men may in a variety of ways make themselves obnoxious to their fellows without breaking the law of equal freedom; hence the necessity of both negative and positive beneficence as supplementary principles to regulate human nature. These, however, belong to the sphere of ethics proper, and not to that part of it we are considering.

It seems to be an inevitable conclusion that, subject only to