made its way into Germany, and soon leavened the views of her economists and statesmen. From 1808-'10, when the Stein-Hardenberg legislation was enacted, down to the Revolution of 1848, when a change of policy began, the rulers of that war-infested land conferred upon labor their most precious gift and its most precious boon—the right to work. But with the destruction of the tranquillity that closed the first half of the century came the inevitable reversions to political and industrial despotism. "The principles that they recommended for adoption," says Boehmert, referring to the results of the Berlin conference of the Government with the workingmen, afterward crystallized into legislation, "were worthy of the worst epochs of the middle ages."[1] It was not until twenty years later, under the régime of the Confederation, that this legislation was wiped out, and industrial liberty again established. Since then, however, the Franco-Prussian War has occurred. The result was the same as in 1793 and 1848. Freedom has fallen into discredit, and is in danger of eclipse. "There has of late," says Prof. Ingram, "been a feeling in France and Germany that, with the abolition of the restrictions enforced by the corporations, there was a real loss of moral and social as well as economic benefits. In Prussia several efforts have been made to restore them to a free basis; and it is understood that further steps of the same kind are likely to be taken by the German Governments, whose object is thus to establish a sort of police of the industrial world, and solve a part of the great problem of the organization of labor."[2] As though despotism could, in times of peace and honest toil, solve any problem but the loss of liberty and the ruin of civilization!
- ↑ Block's Dictionnaire général de la Politique, vol. i, p. 539.
- ↑ Palgrave. Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. i, p. 43. Since this was written the publication of Mr. Spencer's third volume of Principles of Sociology, page 595, acquaints me with the existence of "a recent measure for establishing compulsory guilds of artisans, a manifest reversion." Even Mr. Lecky, whose views have very little in common with those of Mr. Spencer's social philosophy, has recognized this tendency to revert to feudal despotism. Referring to the ideal of labor leaders, he says, "The industrial organization to which they aspire approaches far more nearly to that of the middle ages or of the Tudors than the ideal of Jefferson and Cobden." (Democracy and Liberty, vol. i, p. 258.) Again he says (vol. ii, p. 441): "A considerable workingmen's party on the Continent, but especially in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, desires 'obligatory syndicates,' or, in other words, corporations for carrying on particular trades, to which all who practice those trades must necessarily belong. It is a system curiously like the guilds and other trade organizations and monopolies that flourished in the middle ages. In Austria a very remarkable law, enacted in 1883, established compulsory guilds, including all employer's and workmen, for the smaller industries, with power of regulating apprenticeships. . . . In 1893 a workingmen's congress, held at Bienne, in Switzerland, unanimously voted for obligatory corporations; a revision of the Constitution was prepared which would have made it possible to establish such corporations and suppress free labor, but it was defeated by a small majority on a referendum vote."
