Freedom of contract, therefore, meant for the unorganized workingman at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not freedom, but slavery. It will be later recorded how inevitably the tyranny of the market and the greed of capital combined to reduce workingmen to starvation wages and condemn women and children to degrading labor. One of two things had to happen: The whole laboring class had to be reduced to a condition of permanent slavery, or the laboring class had to combine to put an end to competition between worker and worker that left them at the mercy of the market. That men reduced to the physical condition created by the industrialism of a century ago should have had the intelligence, courage, and self-restraint to combine and act in concert until they were able to some extent to impose rates of wages upon the employers, seems to-day hardly less than miraculous, and ought to serve as a warning to capitalists that they can no longer dispute the coming political power of such workingmen, or remain indifferent to it, or even denounce it with Outlook intemperateness.
Mr. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, is outraged by what he regards as the tyranny of the trade union. Has he ever thought of the tyranny of the trust, or the tyranny of the market from which both inevitably spring? Has he ever understood that such a competitive system as ours can only put an end to anarchy by despotism; and can only shake off despotism at the risk of anarchy?
But the subject of trusts and trade unions is too large to be treated as an incident in the discussion of the evils of the competitive system. I shall content myself, therefore, with summing up briefly the course of events through which industrial development has passed, for the light it throws upon the course through which it has still to pass:
Anarchy of industrial conditions during the Middle Ages gave rise to the guild, which for a season substituted order for disorder.
The order introduced by the guild involved regulation; regulation involves power; and wherever power is exercised free from efficient popular control, it must end in tyranny.
The tyranny of the guild aroused a revolt and the cry of freedom of trade, freedom of industry, freedom of contract; these three freedoms under the competitive system reintroduced an era of anarchy—both in production and distribution—both for the employer and the employee, subject only to the despotism of the market.
The employees undertook to put an end to competition between employees by organizing trade unions.
The employers undertook to put an end to competition between employers by organizing trusts.
So the anarchy which, under the competitive system, must result from freedom, has given rise to the tyranny of the market, and the effort to escape the tyranny of the market to two other tyrannies—of the trust and of the trade union. These two tyrannies stand to-day not only arrayed against one another, but in the bitterest conflict—in the courts, in strikes, lockouts, and ultimately on the field of politics.
One thing stands out in singular relief from the foregoing sketch, viz., that it is freedom—of industry, of contract, and of trade—the battle cry both of the bourgeois employer and the proletarian employee—that has led to these two tyrannies.