Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/395

 DIFFICULTIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 373 opened up a new avenue of personal power for the middle class, and, for every one who could force his way into the ranks either of the proprietors of the newmachines, or of the captains of industry which they necessitated. The enormous increase in personal power thus gained by a comparatively small number of persons, they and the economists not unnaturally mistook foragrowth in general freedom. Nor was this opinion wholly incorrect. The industrial changes were, in a sense, themselves the result of progress in political liberty. The feudal restrictions and aristocratic tyranny of the eighteenth century gave way before the industrial spirit, and the politically free labouter came into existence. But the economic servitude of the worker did not disappear with his political bondage. With the chains of innate status there dropped off also its economic privileges, and the free labouter found himself in a community where the old common rights over the soil were being .gradually but effectually extinguished. He became a landless stranger in his own country. The development of competitive production for sale in the world market, and the supremacy of the machine dustry, involved moreover, in order to live, not merely access to the land, but the use, in addition, of increasing large masses of capital at first in agriculture, then in foreign trade, then in manufacture, and finally now also in distributive industries. The mere worker became steadily less and less industrially independent as' his political freedom increased. From a self-governing producing unit, he passed into a mere item in a vast industrial army over the organization and direction of which he had no control. He was free, but free only to choose to which master he would sell his labour free only to decide from which proprietor he would beg that access to the new instruments of production without which he could not exist. In an age of the petite industrie there was much to be said for the view that the greatest possible personal freedom was to be obtained by the least possible collective rule. The peasant on his own farm, the blacksmith at his own forge, needed only to be let alone to be allowed to follow their own individual desires as to the manner and duration of their work. But the organization of workers into huge armies, the directing of the factory and the warehouse by skilled generals and captains, which is the inevitable outcome. of the machine industry and the world-commerce, have necessarily deprived the average workman of the direction of his own life or the management of his own work. The middle class student, over whose occupation the Juggernaut Car of the Indus- trial Revolution has not passed, finds it difficult to realize how