Both the public opinion and the law of England were, for generations, characterized by the quality of conservatism. The various reform acts, starting in 1832, marked the advent of an epoch of individualism which, lasting for over fifty years, made England the land where personal liberty and private property were perhaps safer than ever before in the world's history. It was a country where government's chief concern was to furnish irreproachable courts, competent police and few but honest civil servants, so that each man might pursue happiness after his own fashion with the least possible interference, yet with complete confidence that he could assert his rights effectively when invaded. Hence it was that America learned to look to England for precedents.
All this is changing. The substitution of the doctrines of collectivism for those of individualism began in 1885 and it proceeds rapidly in many directions. The socialistic harangues one hears from vagabonds mounted on benches in Hyde Park are delivered without interference by the police. The spreading of discontent by paid agitators proceeds at the market crosses and in the taverns of the villages between elections. Later the politicians appear and solicit votes for impossible schemes, an ever increasing proportion of which are actually adopted by Parliament and of which the laws regulating liability for personal injuries, attacks upon land and other forms of property, old age pensions and the methods of public education, furnish typical examples.
Sidewalk Socialism—Hyde Park
The Workingmen's Compensation and Employers' Liability Act of 1906 was a tentative step, but seems likely to lead to extended liability and reduced defences, particularly in the matter of contributory negligence, which has almost ceased to be a factor. One of the clauses of this Act shows that, even when it is proved that the death or serious disablement of a workman is attributable to his own wilful misconduct, compensation may yet be claimed on his behalf from his employer. In addition, another and unheard of form of liability for an employer, requiring him to compensate his servant if the latter falls ill or dies of an "industrial disease" (a list of which diseases was appended to the Act) and with the extraordinary provision that, having paid the compensation, the employer may sue any former employer for the amount, if he can prove the servant actually contracted the complaint in the earlier service and within ten years.
Of course universal accident liability insurance followed, the cost of which must be borne by the proprietor, and, if he is a manufacturer, eventually by the consumer. As may be imagined, such laws give rise to surprising results. The report of one of the great accident liability insurance companies, made shortly after the passage of this law, exhibited, for example, the recovery of damages by a domestic servant, who, while eating a meal, had swallowed her own false teeth; another had contrived to swallow a curtain hook; a third was burned by the bed clothes taking fire from a hot iron which she had wrapped in flannel for the purpose of warming herself. The manageress of a laundry had her hands poisoned by handling copper coins. A footman was bitten while attempting to extract a cat from the jaws of a dog; a nurse-maid was burnt by letting off fire works in the back garden at a private celebration of the servants during the master's absence, and a cook had her eyes scratched by the house cat. Such absurdities show the trend of modern English legislation on the subject.
A glance at an English landscape with its panorama of endless turf and forest and comparatively small areas of cultivation, in marked contrast with the minute utilization of every inch on the Continent, and the reflection that England produces only a portion of the food consumed in its crowded towns, should leave no one surprised at an agitation to modify the existing conditions, which led to continued assaults upon all forms of possession, whether of real or personal property. Acts of Parliament followed each other in quick succession depriving land owners of their holdings to inaugurate chimerical building schemes; giving rent-payers power to condemn and forcibly purchase dwelling houses; attacking property other than land by taxing the inheritance of money so heavily (on a sliding scale of percentages increasing with the size of the estate), as to approach the socialistic ideal that two deaths shall mean the absorption by the State of any large property and that no man shall enjoy a rich grandfather's accumulations; levying upon the living wealthy by ever increasing income taxes, with a like sliding scale, operating upon them alone, while exempting the poor. To this almost confiscatory taxation no limit seems to be in sight.
Old age pensions—one of the most startling novelties of the collectivist—are doubtless economically impossible and morally pernicious unless required to be contributory on the part of those who may later claim them, so that they constitute a system of compulsory saving and insurance, as is the plan in Germany where socialism is at least somewhat scientific. But it remained for the once conservative England to inaugurate the distribution of universal alms without any comprehensive plan for raising the money—the weekly dole to be inevitably increased and the age limit lowered as the exigencies of vote-seeking politicians render expedient.