736 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



made its way into Germany, and soon k-avened the views of her 

 economists and statesmen. From 1808-'10, when the Stein-Har- 

 denberg legislation was enacted, down to the Re"volution 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 Govern- 

 ment with the workingmen, afterward crystallized into legisla- 

 tion, " were worthy of the worst epochs of the middle ages." * 

 It was not until twenty years later, under the regime of the Con- 

 federation, 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 dan- 

 ger of eclipse. " There has of late," says Prof. Ingram, " been 

 a feeling in France and Germany that, with the abolition of the 

 restrictions enforced hj 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 estab- 

 lish a sort of police of the industrial world, and solve a part of 

 the great problem of the organization of labor." f 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 general 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 compulsoi^ 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 despot- 

 ism. 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 JefEerson 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 employei's and workmen, for 

 the smaller industries, with power of regulating apprenticeships. ... In 1893 a working- 

 men's congress, held at Bienne, in Switzerland, unanimously voted for obligatory corpora- 

 tions ; a revision of the Constitution was prepared which would have made it po.-sible to 

 establish such corporations and suppress free labor, but it was defeated by a small majority 

 on a referendum vote." 



