I
POLITICAL and religious freedom cannot be complete without the winning of economic freedom. That economic dependence cuts the nerve of all freedom needs no proof; the history of landownership is full of instances—even in recent times—of the coercion of dependants in matters of opinion and religious observance. So long as one man’s subsistence depends upon the will of another, it is foolish to suppose that he can in any real sense be free; and it is to be counted for righteousness to the Trade Unions that by binding the workers together, they have been able to resist encroachments on the part of the vested interests upon liberty of thought and conscience. Nevertheless, while the present acceptances of the industrial order prevail, the worker still lacks that liberty of the person without which the liberty of the mind, the crown and safeguard of all liberty, can never be more than partial. It is true that the serf was tied to the land in a way in which the modern worker is not tied to his job. Yet the difference is more apparent than real; for the worker has obtained this freedom at the cost of that security of subsistence which the serf did undoubtedly to some extent enjoy. The worker may also choose his master as the serf could not; but it is nevertheless the choice of a master, a man who dictates the terms and conditions of employment, except in so far as the principle of collective bargaining has succeeded in entering in and modifying the magisterial power of the employer. Freedom of thought and conscience is a vain thing except a man be able to translate thought into act and to obey the injunctions of his conscience; and so long as a system, industrial or other, imposes restrictions upon a man’s control of his own person, he does not possess that mobility with which his own personal growth and his ultimate social efficiency are organically bound up. To complete our heritage of freedom, it is essential that the worker should receive a guarantee of economic security. His mind and his conscience mud be delivered from the fear of starvation; for to-day it is only at the risk of exposing himself and his children to hunger that he is able to assert his liberty within the industrial region.[[20]]
[20]. Upon the broader effects of the economic factor of property rights upon liberty, see pp. 246f.
It is further to be noted that industrial conditions circumscribe the mind in another more subtle and probably more dangerous way; for a man may assert—and indeed men have often done so—his liberty of thought, and so save his mind even at the risk of starvation. The evolution of the machine industry has been in a direction which continually decreases the activity of the mind. It requires no more than habituation to a routine process which makes no demand for initiative and independent judgment on the part of the worker. This is apt to lead to a mental inertia which accords well with that bondage of the person which the wage system entails; and this is no doubt the reason (at least in great part) of the general apathy of large masses of the workers in the past to progressive industrial movements. And so long as there is ample and easy opportunity for those parts of the physical and nervous organism which have laid inert through the working day to strike a balance of expenditure with the rest—in the drinking-shop or elsewhere—there seems to be no reason why a large proportion of the workers should not sink into a permanent helot class. We are apt to forget that the progressive elements of the labour movement have not hitherto constituted or represented by a great deal the total mass of the working population; and there has been a real menace to the growth of liberty involved in the possibility that the apathetic elements of the working class might be hardened into a virtual serfdom. For the presence in any society of a permanently unprivileged and disabled element which is condemned in perpetuity to do its menial work is the undoing not only of liberty, but at last of the society itself.
The problem of liberty resolves itself therefore into that of the liberty of the mind. The coming achievement of economic independence is due largely to the circumstance that the Trade Unions have afforded a sanctuary for intellectual freedom against the danger of encroachment upon it by the system of private capital and the conditions of the machine industry.[[21]] It must, however, be remembered that the freedom of the mind is dependent on factors other than external; and chiefly upon the capacity to use mind in coherent and purposeful ways. A mind capable of such use will not long remain bound. This aspect of the problem belongs properly to the sphere of education; and it is in that setting only that it can be profitably handled. At this point our concern is with the external conditions of mental freedom.
[21]. It is worth noticing that on the other hand, the growth of the machine industry has itself indirectly co-operated in this process. “It follows as a consequence of the large and increasing requirements enforced by the machine technology that the period of preliminary training is necessarily longer, and the schooling demanded for general preparation grows unremittingly more exacting. So that, apart from all question of humanitarian sentiment or of popular fitness for democratic citizenship, it has become a matter of economic expediency, simply as a proposition in technological efficiency at large, to enforce the exemption of children from industrial employment until a later date and to extend their effective school age appreciably beyond what would once have been sufficient to meet all the commonplace requirements of skilled workmanship.” (Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship, p. 309.) This educational process has had consequences beyond those immediately sought. The quickening and enlargement of mind which have followed even the very inadequate education hitherto provided in the common schools, have made a very considerable contribution to the movement for economic emancipation.