Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/230

216 All these developments and more may be summed up as illustrations of collectivity—an ideal which has its advocates and professors, and which looks in the future for regulated civic and national monopolies instead of unrestricted freedom of individual activity and for the supervision and control of those industries which may remain unabsorbed by state or town. In pursuit of this last conception there have been put forward not only requirements as to hours and conditions of labor, but a demand also for a living wage or a minimum below which no workman shall be paid; and this principle has been already adopted by some municipalities in respect of their monopolized industries. The state itself indeed has through the popular branch of the legislature declared more or less clearly in favor of the same principle in respect of the industries which are conducted in its service. We have not only to acknowledge the continued slowness of politicians to adopt and enforce the teaching of economists such as Jevons contemplated, but also the rise of another school of economic thought which competes for and in some measure successfully obtains the attention of the makers of laws. We must therefore inquire whether the failure of former teaching has not been due to errors in itself rather than to the indocility of those who have neglected it. The greatest difficulty which the teachers of the past have to overcome when put upon their self-defense lies in the suspicion, or more than suspicion, of an occupied multitude that their promises have failed. It is thought of them, if it is not openly said, that they had the ear of legislators for a generation, that the course and conduct of successive administrations were governed by their principles; and yet society, as we know it, presents much the same features, and the lifting up of the poor out of the mire is as much as ever a promise of the future. Some quicker method of introducing a new order is called for, and any scheme offering an assurance of it is welcomed. A ready answer can be given to much of the suspicion of failure that is entertained. That freedom of industrial action which is the first postulate of the economists has never been secured. The limitations and restrictions necessarily consequent upon the system of land laws established among us are not commonly understood, but although much has been done to liberate agriculture from their fetters its perfect freedom has not been attained. There may be free trade in the United Kingdom and free land in the United States, but the country is yet to be found in which both are realized, and even if both these requisites were attained the sores of social life would not be removed unless the spirit of self-reliance were fully developed. And how little has been done to secure this essential condition of progress! Nay, how much has been done by law and still more by usage to weaken and