In its absence, employers, being all of one trade, come to an understanding to keep wages down. Hence, even in the same country, as in Belgium and in England, wages of labor are much higher in districts where there is manufacturing, than in those where there is only farming. (3) Every country has its own kind of public opinion as to the style in which its working classes ought to be able to live. This demands in America a much higher standard of comfort than in Europe. But if the products of European labor and capital came in free of duty, it would not be possible to maintain this higher standard. Our workingmen would be dragged down to the level of the laborers of monarchical and aristocratic societies. Under the Protective Tariffs of 1860-1892, the American standard rose faster and higher than in any part of the world, as was shown by the inflow of European labor to secure the benefits and the (alleged) disadvantages of Protection. Whether it was better to admit it or to exclude it, is not here the question. The fact was that it came.

17. The Constitution of the United States says that government is established to "promote the general welfare.” In all countries it is held responsible for this. Parties have been driven from power in our own country because business distress prevailed under their administration. In Europe violent revolutions are almost always associated with popular distress and scarcity. To insist that the government shall abstain from all management of industry, is to refuse it the power to discharge this responsibility. It is to limit its powers as the nations in fact never have agreed to have them limited. Now Protection makes no more interference with the movement of industry than is sufficient for its purpose. It does not do anything for individuals, or confer personal advantages of any kind on them. It merely creates a new industrial condition, which every one is equally free

to take advantage of. By enlarging the number of employments it also enlarges the range of individual liberty, as it gives greater choice of fields of labor. It thus helps to develop that individuality in the working classes which Socialism seeks to destroy. It leads away from Socialism, not toward it.

In this connection it is well to remember that we do not have Protection because we have manufactures but manufactures because we have had Protection.

18. Protection and Free Trade are in controversy. The former is unfairly charged with artificiality, hostility to freedom, class legislation and paternalism. It has the sanction of even Free Traders in their wiser moments, and can be defended as a benefit to all classes.

CHAPTER XII.

Communism, Socialism and Anarchism.

1. OUR modern system of land, labor and industry is based on private ownership and competition. Land is distributed among owners in severalty and they are given almost as complete control of it as though it were clothing or tools or cattle. The accumulations of past labor are mostly in the hands of private capitalists, who pay in wages for the labor of the working classes, and make such bargains as they can in the labor-market. Transportation by sea and land is carried on by individuals and private or semi-private corporations, under the laws which control the common carrier, while the State takes charge of making common roads only, and in some cases leaves even that to turnpike companies. The extension of enterprise is left to private initiative, and even Tariff legislation goes no farther than to create larger opportunity for private enterprise. Only in the regulation of coin and paper money, in the creation of harbors and water-ways, and the carriage of letters, does the government directly enter the sphere of industry, and undertake to do what the people might be left to do for themselves individually or by co-operation.

2. To this whole system of private management objection is now brought on the ground that it inflicts injustice upon the people at large, while enabling a few individuals to acquire an excessive share of the wealth produced by common labor of all. Those who make this objection belong to several schools. (1) The Communist holds that private property is essentially wrong, and whatever has any use that meets a human need should be common property, and

should be placed at the service of every individual who is in need of it. Especially he would have the land held by the State only, and tilled by the people as its members, the harvest being divided among them proportionally to their needs. Something approaching this was the actual usage in primitive society, and something like it may be seen still in countries which have made little progress in civilization.

3. Everywhere the communistic system of property has borne the same fruit. It has kept people miserably poor by taking away all motive to improvement. It has made the individual count for nothing by making society all-powerful. It thus has stereotyped methods of work, opinions and social arrangements. It is only a minority of mankind that has even now extricated itself from communistic slavery of the individual to the community, but it is that minority that has done all that is worth recording in the world's history. It embraces all the free peoples, who govern themselves, while communistic societies and nations always have bowed under the yoke of a master. It embraces all the peoples who have risen to literary culture and social refinement, and have learned to think each for himself, instead of taking his opinions at the hands of others. It also embraces all the nations who have risen out of the poverty of the savage or the lower type of barbarian, and have secured a high standard of living for their people. The equality which Communism secures is the equality of pauperism, ignorance and political subjection.

4. (2) Socialism approaches the question from a more modern point of view. Recognizing the fact that the actual product of the world's labor is less important than the instruments of production by which the stock is maintained, it proposes to take those instruments into the hands of the State. Beginning with the railroads and the telegraphs, it would gradually or quickly transfer the ownership of all the

capital of the world to government, and vest in it the direction and extension of enterprise. To secure a proper distribution of labor to meet the actual needs of society, it would vest in the government the power to prescribe to each on what he should spend his time, instead of leaving this to personal tastes, or to private opinion of what needs to be done. It would pay every worker in a check, which would certify the time he had spent in the production of the article he furnished, and it would make these checks receivable for products produced by the same amount of time spent by workmen of other kinds.

5. The Socialist urges as a reason for this industrial revolution some very keen and often instructive criticisms upon the system now in vogue. Part indeed of his criticism grows out of false and exploded theories of the political economists, which were in vogue when Socialism became a system. One of these was the notion that land derives its value from the natural and inherent properties of the soil, and not from human labor expended on it or on land in its neighborhood (see page 19). Another was the notion that there is a natural and necessary rate of wages, being the amount needed to keep up the supply of workmen, as though it were a breed of domestic animals, whose wills were not to be taken into account (see page 27). Yet another was the theory that rent of land grows out of its monopoly by the first in possession, as these took up the best lands, and those who came later had to pay them rent, or put up with worse soils (see page 15).

If these things were as the economists declared, then our industrial system must be too bad for anything but destruction. But they are not true; and under our system of private ownership and free competition there is a steady tendency to equality of condition, not to the misery and enslavement of the mass of mankind.