Chapter V.
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF FREEDOM.
“When we say that one animal is higher than another, we mean that it is more able to control its own destiny. Progress is just this: Increase in Freedom.”—Stewart McDowall.
“Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs chercheront a vous persuader que vous êtes vraiment libres, parce qu’ils auront écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de liberté et l’auront affiché à tous les carrefours.
La liberté n’est pas un placard qu’on lit au coin de la rue. Elle est une puissance vivante qu’on sent en soi et autour de soi, le génie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.
La liberté luira sur vous quand, a force de courage et de persévérance, vous vous serez affranchis de toutes ces servitudes.”
Lamennais.
I
POLITICAL and religious freedom cannot be complete without the winning of economic freedom. That economic dependence cuts the nerve of all freedom needs no proof; the history of landownership is full of instances—even in recent times—of the coercion of dependants in matters of opinion and religious observance. So long as one man’s subsistence depends upon the will of another, it is foolish to suppose that he can in any real sense be free; and it is to be counted for righteousness to the Trade Unions that by binding the workers together, they have been able to resist encroachments on the part of the vested interests upon liberty of thought and conscience. Nevertheless, while the present acceptances of the industrial order prevail, the worker still lacks that liberty of the person without which the liberty of the mind, the crown and safeguard of all liberty, can never be more than partial. It is true that the serf was tied to the land in a way in which the modern worker is not tied to his job. Yet the difference is more apparent than real; for the worker has obtained this freedom at the cost of that security of subsistence which the serf did undoubtedly to some extent enjoy. The worker may also choose his master as the serf could not; but it is nevertheless the choice of a master, a man who dictates the terms and conditions of employment, except in so far as the principle of collective bargaining has succeeded in entering in and modifying the magisterial power of the employer. Freedom of thought and conscience is a vain thing except a man be able to translate thought into act and to obey the injunctions of his conscience; and so long as a system, industrial or other, imposes restrictions upon a man’s control of his own person, he does not possess that mobility with which his own personal growth and his ultimate social efficiency are organically bound up. To complete our heritage of freedom, it is essential that the worker should receive a guarantee of economic security. His mind and his conscience mud be delivered from the fear of starvation; for to-day it is only at the risk of exposing himself and his children to hunger that he is able to assert his liberty within the industrial region.[[20]]