272 SOCIAL REGULATION 



ity of thought and the possibility of combination in all directions. 

 Hence associations of many kinds which, being capable of good and 

 evil, must be regulated by law, and must often be the subject of 

 political action. 



The solution of social and political questions by the progressive 

 thinkers of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth 

 centuries was based mainly upon individualism. They considered 

 man, not combinations of men, and they regarded all individuals 

 as equal, isolated, and independent units. The prophets of demo- 

 cracy, supposing that each person would think for himself, failed to 

 appreciate the contagious quality of ideas and the compulsory 

 power exerted over opinions by organized bodies of men. They 

 assumed also that the real interests of all men were fundamentally 

 in harmony, and hence they saw no strong motive for combina- 

 tion. The English individualists, moreover, looked upon freedom to 

 combine as an essential part of personal liberty, and they did not 

 perceive a danger that the right might be so abused as to encroach 

 upon the liberty of others. This is very clearly put in Professor 

 Dicey 's Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth 

 Century. 



Rousseau, whose acumen in grasping the real nature of a problem 

 is more striking than his good sense in finding the solution of it, 

 perceived the difficulties that might arise in his ideal commonwealth 

 from the presence of combinations of men. He saw that his prin- 

 ciple of a common will, ascertained by counting votes, and then 

 accepted as the unanimous wish of the whole people, would be futile 

 where there was an organized minority. He declared, therefore, 

 that a community is incapable of a common will where factions or 

 sects exist. If he really imagined that any community would ever 

 arise without those incumbrances, he showed that although a good 

 philosopher, he was a bad prophet. He was a particularly luckless 

 prophet, because he wrote just at the time when the era of invention 

 was about to open the gates for the greatest development of volun- 

 tary combinations of men that the world has ever known, and when 

 in public life the very democracy which he preached w r as about 

 to make political parties a recognized and permanent element in the 

 state. 



He was, however, a good philosopher, because he was right in 

 believing that the presence of associations, or groups, or bodies of 

 men of any kind, makes the opinion or action of a community quite 

 a different thing from what it would be if no such bodies existed ; 

 and this for several reasons. 



In the first place, a composite majority made up of majorities of 

 fractional parts is a very different thing from a majority of the whole 

 people, and may be exactly the reverse of it. Each man in such 



