This first trickle of the stream, however, though it is of considerable historical interest as a point of departure, is not of very definite moment to our subject compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some of which are already law, others upon the point of becoming law, and which definitely recognise the Servile State, the re-establishment of status in the place of contract, and the universal division of citizens into two categories of employers and employed.
These last merit a very different consideration, for they will represent to history the conscious and designed entry of Servile Institutions into the old Christian State. They are not “origins,” small indications of coming change which the historian will painfully discover as a curiosity. They are the admitted foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by a few, confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis upon which a novel and stable society shall arise to replace the unstable and passing phase of Capitalism.
They fall roughly into three categories:—
(1) Measures by which the insecurity of the proletariat shall be relieved through the action of the employing class, or of the proletariat itself acting under compulsion.
(2) Measures by which the employer shall be compelled to give not less than a certain minimum for any labour he may purchase, and
(3) Measures which compel a man lacking the means of production to labour, though he may have made no contract to that effect.
The last two, as will be seen in a moment, are complementary one of another.
As to the first: Measures to palliate the insecurity of the proletariat.
We have of this an example in actual law at this moment. And that law the Insurance Act (whose political source and motive I am not here discussing) follows in every particular the lines of a Servile State.