THE COMING OF SOCIALISM 107 



action and a deeper individuality on the part of the 

 members. 



Organisation no doubt carries with it limitation. When 

 we become members of a club, or church, or a body of 

 college fellows, or a business concern, we give up some- 

 thing of our own will. In this respect all social usages, 

 traditions, institutions, and laws, are what Rousseau 

 thought them bonds and chains ; and the free man 

 would be the man who ran wild in woods, enjoyed the 

 liberty of the consistent Individualist, and of the wild. 

 ass. But, precisely in the degree to which the purposes 

 of the society are rational and it attains these purposes, 

 what is limited for the individual is not his freedom but 

 his caprice, not his power to do right but his inclination 

 to do wrong. 



And such, on the whole, are the so-called ' ' interferences 

 with the individual," which are implied in the restrictions, 

 the control, the activities of the State and the city. Either 

 by explicit ordinances, or by a recognised code of usages, 

 customs and manners, we are limited in a thousand ways. 

 We cannot ramble whither we will over meadow and 

 through forest as our blue-painted ancestors could ; we 

 must keep to the paths and roads. We cannot be judges 

 in our own cause, nor right our own wrongs. We cannot 

 even make any bargains we please, nor do quite as we 

 like with our own. We cannot employ women in pits 

 though they be willing, nor little children in factories, 

 nor men in foul air and unwholesome premises. 



But the good citizen and the intelligent capitalist does 

 not desire to do these things. What the legislature has 

 done, on the whole, is to limit the will to do what is wrong 

 and stupid. It is only the pseudo-freedom of irrational 



