(2) Labour Protection does not include the free self-help of the worker, nor free mutual help, but only a part (cf. 3) of the protection afforded to wage-earners by the State, if necessary in co-operation with voluntary effort.
Labour Protection in its modern form is only the outcome of a very old and on the whole far more important kind of Labour Protection, in the widest sense of the term, which far from abolishing the old forms of self-help and mutual help, actually presupposes them, strengthens, ensures and supplements them wherever the more recent developments of national industry render this necessary. Labour Protection, properly so called, only steps in when self-help and mutual help, supplemented by ordinary State protection, fail to meet the exigencies of the situation, whether momentarily and on account of special circumstances, or by the necessities of the case.
This second far-reaching limitation of the meaning needs a little further explanation.
Labour Protection in its more extended sense always meant and must still mean, first and foremost, self-help of the workers themselves; in part, individual self-help to guard against the dangers of service, in part, united self-help by means of the class organisation of trades-unions.
Side by side with this self-help there has long existed a comprehensive system of free mutual help.
This assumes the form of family protection exercised by relations and guardians against harsh employers, and by the father, brother, etc., in their relation of employers in family industries; also the somewhat similar form of patriarchal protection extended by the employer to his workpeople.
Furthermore it includes that protection afforded by the pressure of religion, the common conscience or public opinion upon the consciences of employers, acting partly through the organs of the press, clubs, and other vehicles of expression, as well as through non-political public institutions, and corporate bodies of various kinds, especially and more directly through the Church, and also indirectly through the schools.
Without family and patriarchal protection, without the protection afforded by civil morality and religious sentiment, Labour Protection, in its strict sense, working through the State alone, would be able to effect little.
Family and patriarchal protection outweigh therefore in importance all more modern forms of Labour Protection, and will always continue to be the most efficacious. The protection of the Church has always been powerful from the earliest times.