REVERSIONS IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL LIFE. 785 



sions of industrial territory amounted in Paris alone to more than 

 live hundred thousand francs ; that the money wasted upon the 

 suits of comparatively small corporations amounted to twenty- 

 five thousand. "From St. Louis to Louis XIV," he says further 

 in a striking summary of the fate that befell them, " there was 

 not a sovereign who did not impose restrictions, taxes, and new 

 regulations upon them ; the courts overpowered them with judg- 

 ment and fines without diminishing their ardor or calming their 

 hatreds." * Founded to establish order and to fulfill a mission of 

 mercy, they degenerated into engines of oppression, confusion, 

 and degradation, giving birth, in a word, to all the evils of a 

 society in a state of dissolution. 



Such anarchy, which prevailed in England as well as in 

 France, though in a less degree, could not be permitted to last. 

 It would in time have wrecked society morally and industrially. 

 Although ruinously delayed, relief came at last through the 

 labors of thinkers, statesmen, and revolutionists, but especially 

 through the ameliorations of the long peace that followed the 

 devastating and demoralizing wars of Napoleon. Adam Smith 

 was among the first to come to the rescue. The whole of his 

 great work was a potent protest against monopoly in all forms. 

 He pointed out that "the exclusive privileges of corporations, 

 statutes of apprenticeship, and those which restrain in particular 

 employments the competition of a smaller number than would 

 otherwise go into them " were " encroachments upon natural lib- 

 erty.'' t But it was more than fifty years before the laws that he 

 inveighed against so powerfully were finally repealed. In France 

 also the thinkers led the way. " Let complete liberty of com- 

 merce be maintained," said Quesnay. " When the interest of the 

 individual is exactly the same as the general interest," said Gour- 

 nay, "the best thing to do is to leave every man to do as he 

 likes." X Applying these principles to the corporations, Turgot 

 proclaimed that " the right to work is the sacred and inalienable 

 property of the poor man." Again he said, " All sound princi- 

 ples were violated by the accepted doctrine that it was a royal 

 right that the prince might sell and subjects might buy." * But 

 the work of industrial emancipation that he tried in vain to do 

 a work that might have saved his country from the horrors of the 

 Revolution was among the first and most beneficent achieve- 

 ments of that frightful convulsion. The Wealth of Nations early 



* Blanqui. History of Political Economy, pp. 183, 184. 



\ Palgrave. Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. i, p. 430. See whole of Part IL 

 chapter x, Wealth of Nations, Piogers's edition. 



\ Lowell. Eve of the French Pievolution, pp. 234, 235. 



* Palgrave. Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. i, p. 43 1 



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