(a) Its fundamental criterion is employment. In other words, I am compelled to enter a scheme providing me against the mischances of illness and unemployment not because I am a citizen, but only if I am:
(1) Exchanging services for goods; and either
(2) Obtaining less than a certain amount of goods for those services, or
(3) A vulgar fellow working with his hands. The law carefully excludes from its provisions those forms of labour to which the educated and therefore powerful classes are subject, and further excludes from compulsion the mass of those who are for the moment earning enough to make them a class to be reckoned with as economically free. I may be a writer of books who, should he fall ill, will leave in the greatest distress the family which he supports. If the legislator were concerned for the morals of citizens, I should most undoubtedly come under this law, under the form of a compulsory insurance added to my income tax. But the legislator is not concerned with people of my sort. He is concerned with a new status which he recognises in the State, to wit, the proletariat. He envisages the proletariat not quite accurately as men either poor, or, if they are not poor, at any rate vulgar people working with their hands, and he legislates accordingly.
(b) Still more striking, as an example of status taking the place of contract, is the fact that this law puts the duty of controlling the proletariat and of seeing that the law is obeyed not upon the proletariat itself, but upon the Capitalist class.
Now this point is of an importance that cannot be exaggerated.
The future historian, whatever his interest in the first indications of that profound revolution through which we are so rapidly passing, will most certainly fix upon that one point as the cardinal landmark of our times. The legislator surveying the Capitalist State proposes as a remedy for certain of its evils the establishment of two categories in the State, compels the lower man to registration, to a tax, and the rest of it, and further compels the upper man to be the instrument in enforcing that registration and in collecting that tax. No one acquainted with the way in which any one of the great changes of the past has taken place, the substitution of tenure for the Roman proprietary right in land, or the substitution of the mediæval peasant for the serf of the Dark Ages, can possibly misunderstand the significance of such a turning point in our history.
Whether it will be completed or whether a reaction will destroy it is another matter. Its mere proposal is of the greatest possible moment in the inquiry we are here pursuing.
Of the next two groups, the fixing of a Minimum Wage and the Compulsion to Labour (which, as I have said, and will shortly show, are complementary one to the other), neither has yet appeared in actual legislation, but both are planned, both thought out, both possessed of powerful advocates, and both upon the threshold of positive law.