A REJOINDER TO M. BE LAVELEYE. 191 



but to interventions of certain kinds. The abolition of laws forbid- 

 ding 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 em- 

 ployed 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 Eng- 

 land 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 : 



" One fact is sufficient to show the great progress due to this State legisla- 

 tion : in an ever-increasing population, crime is rapidly and greatly diminish- 

 ing" (p. 496). 



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 dwell- 

 ing 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 



