Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/810

 788 States to give them rights and privileges as violative of the principle of equal freedom and as hostile to the interests of society and civilization as those that Boylean conferred upon the corporations of Paris. Under the specious plea of protecting the interests of the public and of self-improvement, both morally and intellectually—a plea that Boyleau himself did not forget to make —there is in progress a movement to extend these rights and privileges to the members of the same trades and professions in other States. Unless it is checked, an achievement that has not yet been undertaken, we shall have fastened upon us before we are aware of it the same intolerable industrial and professional tyranny that contributed so powerfully to the French Revolution; for the rules and regulations are becoming so numerous and despotic, particularly those that have emanated from the plumbing trade, that individual liberty, in all that pertains to that business at least, is practically denied. They rival in minuteness and vexatiousness anything that Boyleau produced. For the judgment and will of the person most interested in the perfection of a piece of work are substituted the judgment and will of the person least interested.

If organization, whether industrial or political or social, involves a loss of liberty, it also involves, as the story of the French corporations shows, a more serious loss of truth and honor. It does not lead simply to cruel intolerance; it leads to the grossest hypocrisy. Were the slightest value to be attached to the pleas and apologies of the modern corporations, there would be no possible escape from the conviction that they are animated by the loftiest motives. Their ambition is not limited to self-improvement and deliverance from an obloquy and