are the elements of political institutions which give them their form and value.
We who live in the midst of a modern civilized state, with high security of persons and property, with well-defined rights, with no burdensome duties, with no privileges secured to some at the expense of others, easily assume that this all comes of itself, that it is the natural order of things, and that any departure from it would have to be forced by injustice. We believe that men have easily made up their minds that they would have it in this way, and that, by adopting proper resolutions at the right moment, they have brought it about. We therefore suppose that all we have is secured to us by the most stable and unquestionable reality, that we run no risk of losing it, that we can afford to find fault with it, throw it away, despise it, and break it in pieces.
The facts are far otherwise. The peace, order, security, and freedom from care of modern civilized life are not the product of human resolutions; they are due at last to economic forces, which, by expanding the conditions of human existence during the last three hundred years, have made all which we possess possible. Our history has been written on politics almost entirely; and, without joining in the current easy abuse of it on that account, we may fairly say that people have not learned at all to understand the extent to which political resolutions are controlled by economic conditions, or the extent to which political and social institutions are conditioned in economic facts. It is not too much to say that economic facts are always present and controlling in the apparently arbitrary acts of constitution-makers and legislators. Our whole history must be reconstructed with a view to this fact. If that is once done, we shall understand better the narrow range within which the
