but to interventions of certain kinds. The abolition of laws forbidding trade-combinations, and of laws forbidding the travelling of artisans, were surely measures which improved "the condition of the working-classes;" and these were measures which I should have been eager to join in obtaining. Similarly, at the present time I am desirous of seeing provided the easiest and most efficient remedies for sailors fraudulently betrayed into unseaworthy ships; and I heartily sympathize with those who denounce the continual encroachments of landowners—enclosures of commons and the turf-covered borders of lanes, &c. These, and kindred injustices to the working-classes, stretching far back, I am no less desirous to see remedied than is M. de Laveleye; provided always that due care is taken that other injustices are not committed in remedying them. Evidently, then, this expression of M. de Laveleye raises a false issue. Again, he says that I call this public intervention on behalf of the working-classes "a return to ancient militant society." This is quite a mistake. In ancient militant society the condition of the working-classes was very little cared for, and, indeed, scarcely thought of. My assertion was that the coercive system employed, was like the coercive system employed in a militant society: the ends to which the systems are directed, being quite different. But turning to the chief point in his question, I meet it by counter-questions—Why is it that the "new industrial organization" is best developed in England? and—Under what conditions was it developed? I need hardly point out to M. de Laveleye that the period during which industrial organization in England developed more rapidly and extensively than elsewhere, was a period during which the form of government was less coercive than elsewhere, and the individual less interfered with than elsewhere. And if now, led by the admirers of Continental bureaucracies, eager philanthropists are more rapidly extending State-administrations here than they are being extended abroad, it is obviously because there is great scope for the further extension of them here, while abroad there is little scope for the further extension of them.
In justification of coercive methods for "improving the condition of the working-classes," M. de Laveleye says:
Now, without dwelling on the fact, shown in Mr. Pike's "History of Crime in England," that "violence and lawlessness" had increased during the war period which ended at Waterloo; and without dwelling on the fact that, after the recovery from prostration produced by war, there was a diminution of crime along with that great diminution of coercive legislation which characterized the long period of peace; I go on to remark that a primary condition to the correct drawing of
