view, democracy has not yet been achieved. Men are frequently under the domination of industrial conditions which inexorably override statutes, constitutions, and bills of rights. Unless the workman can negotiate on equal terms for his labor, the only commodity which he ever has to offer in the world's markets, -unless there is contractual equality, mere political equality may be a mockery and a delusion; his political rights may even be surrendered as a part of the consideration in the contract for labor. But through sane social legislation, based upon principles of equity and equality, we may gradually advance towards real democracy. When we once begin to see the reality we shall never again be satisfied with the phantasm.

II

THE FUNCTIONS OF A STATE

It is not proposed here to enter upon any general discussion of the nature, sphere, or end of the state, but to consider briefly some of the functions of a state as bearing upon our subject; to consider whether the experiences - not to say experiments - of civilized nations, including our own, may not furnish us with some light and guidance.

The boundaries of what may be termed social legislation cannot be deemed as definite or as having any degree of permanency. The laws and institutions of the state challenge frequent scrutiny. Changing conditions of industry or of society, more enlightened conceptions of government, may call for radical changes in the attitude of the state towards the individual, and laws in which there has been general and long-continued acquiescence may be found inadequate or even founded originally upon theories which no longer seem tenable.

The modern state, in its legislation, pursues its course somewhere between the extremes of individualism and socialism. The very conception of a state as organized society involves

the idea of law which shall restrain or compel, shall interfere with the freedom of the individual for ethical, economic, social, or other ends. No one would go to the extreme of individualism. We are all socialists, perhaps paternalists, although the term paternalism seems inapplicable in a democracy. The citizen says l'état c'est moi; he does not abdicate or surrender, he merely delegates. He does not call upon the state as a child upon a father, but rather as a master upon a servant; in his collective capacity, he commands it to do his will to do that which it is inconvenient or impracticable for him to do in his individual capacity. The members of a community find that many desirable ends can be accomplished only through collective agencies. The individual cannot educate his child, provide suitable avenues of communication, protect himself against impositions and frauds in food and drugs which endanger health or life, stamp out disease or protect himself against its contagion, or care for orphans or the insane, for dependents of many kinds. These illustrations point to social legislation in which there is substantially universal acquiescence in this country. We look upon the assumption of these functions as inseparable from a wellregulated state. Yet the stern individualist needs to be reminded that almost every step in

this direction has met with the strenuous opposition of his class which has insisted that it was taken in violation of some sacred and infallible rule of action. But to conceive of a state divested of these and similar functions is to retrace our steps far back towards barbarism.

The state should move cautiously and tentatively in the direction of experiment; but, as the evolution of the modern state plainly shows, it must move. It must often subordinate the independence of the individual to the general good; it must work out many of its beneficent purposes by collective means; it must sometimes compel the individual to do that which he ought to be willing to do.

It would seem that adhesion to the existing order of things can be counted upon to prevent hasty and ill-considered legislation. In fact, there are no pages of history more heartrending than those which tell the story of great industrial wrongs affecting myriads of men, women, and children in Great Britain and of the apathy and immobility of those, including statesmen, economists, and philanthropists, to whom the situation ought to have appealed irresistibly. To the cry of children robbed of childhood and of women robbed of womanhood her great statesmen solemnly replied, laissez faire. The facts elicited and

proclaimed by Peel and others as early as 1802 would have awakened the sympathy of savages. One would say that the ethical sense of the nation ought to have been stirred to thorough and instant action. Yet forty years afterwards, during which the subject had been kept constantly before the public mind through frequent parliamentary inquiries and through the efforts of a few individuals, ostracized for their zeal and humanity, — it could be said conservatively that a state of things existed "which could scarcely be paralleled by any of the barbarous practices which contributed to make negro slavery so abhorrent." But England, self-complacent, inert, mindful of the awful perils of paternalism, remained passive. Proposals to restrict the evils met with the most bitter class opposition; ' those pecuniarily interested "were convinced that national prosperity and their own profits must rise and fall together ";' and the legislation suggested was denounced as an impertinence, as an unwarranted interference with the right of manufacturers to regulate their own affairs, as a menace to England's prosperity and her commercial supremacy. "It took twenty-five years of legislation to restrict

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1 Knight, History of England, viii, 395.

2 Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vi, 226. 'Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, p. 19.

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