What it does is this: it undertakes by means of an army and navy our external defence; secures by the police our internal safety; makes provision by which no person need starve; enforces upon all a certain amount of education; and enjoins a set of sanitary regulations for the protection of the community from infectious or contagious disease. These are the main items of its work, but beyond them it provides the means of communication by post and telegraph; fixes in certain degree the fares on railways and the price of gas; encourages thrift by the institution of savings banks; and gives us all an opportunity for religious exercise by the provision of an Established Church.
The objectionable part of this is that which directly interferes with personal opinion or private enterprise. The noble saying of Cromwell—“The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies”—spoken before its time, as even some of the Protector’s friends may have considered, must now be extended to the contention that the State has no concern whatever with the opinions of its citizens, and that it ought not to endow any sect at the expense of the rest. Concerning the competition with private enterprise, the State, in providing a system of national education and a postal and telegraph service, has gone to the verge of what it should do in such a direction.
While, therefore, the State should not abandon any function it now exercises, the severest caution ought to be used before another is undertaken. All attempts of the ruling power to interfere too closely with the private concerns of men—as witness the sumptuary laws and those against usury—have defeated themselves, and it is not for us to revive systems of interference which, even in the Middle Ages, broke down. It is no answer that some things are going so badly that State-interference may be considered absolutely necessary, and that it is merely the extremity of nervousness that hinders the experiment being tried. Caution is not cowardice, and no man is called upon to be foolhardy to prove his freedom from fear.
When it is said that, in certain directions, matters have come to such a pass that the State must more actively interfere, let us note that extremes meet upon this as upon so many other matters; for the cry that “the country is going to the dogs” is nowadays raised as lustily by some friends of the working man as ever it has been by the retired colonels and superannuated admirals whose exclusive possession it was so long. And the remedy suggested is that the State should do this, that, and the other, with an utter ignoring of the fact, which all history proves, that the creation of an additional army of officials would strangle enterprise and stifle invention. Thus from the general, it will be necessary to go to the particular, and to ask how far the proposed remedy would be effectual. The principle here argued is that the State should concern itself simply with external defence, internal safety, the protection of those unable to guard themselves, and the undertaking of such work for the general good as cannot be better done by private enterprise; and this principle holds good against many a nostrum now put forward as an infallible remedy for social ills.
XXXIII.—SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?
Among the many social questions which the pressure of circumstances may soon make political is that of the State regulation of the hours of labour. The president of the Trades Union Congress for 1887 advocated, for instance, the passing of an Eight Hours Bill; and it is desirable to consider whether this would in any respect be a step in a right direction.
The argument for such a measure appears in principle to be this: that the classes dependent upon manual labour for their livelihood have too many hands for the work there is to do; that those who do get work toil too long; and that both evils would be remedied by restricting the hours of labour, more men thus finding employment and all working well within their strength.