May 28, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



487 



economic development is even to begin. The lay 

 of the land may be such that an extensive system 

 of drainage may be indispensable in order to ren- 

 der it fit for cultivation. The whim or interest of 

 individuals may, and where they are allowed free 

 play usually do, prevent the inauguration and 

 completion of any such work. Associative action 

 may be, and ordinarily is, the only means of secur- 

 ing such an end. Voluntary associative action is 

 generally precluded by the refusal of some indi- 

 viduals to take part whose co-operation is neces- 

 sary to success. The only means left is com- 

 pulsory associative action through and by the 

 state. The time soon comes in a progressive 

 society when, in order to secure a higher degree 

 of efficiency, new crops, new kinds of live-stock, 

 new inventions, are necessary ; when a new or- 

 ganization of the labor of the coimtry must be 

 undertaken, as, for instance, the abolition of 

 slavery or serfdom, or the development of a sys- 

 tem of small farms, — all things which are just as 

 necessary to an increased production as the appli- 

 cation of more labor and capital, and all things 

 which can be accomplished on a great scale only 

 by the exercise of state power. Furthermore, a 

 time comes when, in order to secure a larger pro- 

 duction, the great mass of the people must be edu- 

 cated, and the skilled laborers necessary to the 

 economic progress of a society must have facilities 

 for acquiring a technical education. All recent 

 history shows that the state must here interfere, 

 and compel co-operative action on the part of its 

 citizens, if the necessary facilities are to be ob- 

 tained. To take another example, science and ex- 

 perience demonstrate, that in order to obtain the 

 maximum of agricultural production, for instance, 

 from a given country, it is necessary that a cer- 

 tain portion of the surface should be wooded. 

 History show ; us that there is no adequate eco- 

 nomic motive for private individuals to preserve 

 this proportion if it has once been established, or 

 to establish it if it has never existed : hence the 

 necessity for the state to interfere, and to secure 

 by the application of compulsion the necessary 

 conditions of progress. An excellent instance of 

 this same thing is to be found in our modern rail- 

 road system. In order to secure the building and 

 equipment of the railway, we have had to pay 

 enormous sums, directly and indirectly, from the 

 common treasury of society. The state, in all its 

 various governmental forms, national and local, 

 has contributed land, money, and legal powers 

 and guaranties, without which our railways would 

 have remained a comparatively insignificant ele- 

 ment in our system of transportation. It has 

 created fictitious persons for the ownership and 

 management of the railways. It has given those 



fictitious persons not only immense sums of capi- 

 tal, but peculiar and ample privileges ; among 

 others that far-reaching and most significant attri- 

 bution of sovereignty, — the right to take the 

 property of real persons against their will, and 

 give them, not what the owners consider it 

 worth, but what it seems worth to paities who 

 look upon it in the character of disinterested 

 appraisers. 



To sum up this phase of the subject in a few 

 w T ords : a community, on emerging from barba- 

 rism, and as it passes from one stage of civilization 

 to another, finds, that, in order to secure a healthy 

 economic progress, large quantities of capital and 

 labor must be expended along lines where a few 

 individuals, by their ignorance or obstinacy, may 

 prevent that collective action without which such 

 investment cannot be made. It is necessary for 

 the state to interfere in such cases ; and its action 

 is as truly economic action as that which removes 

 by a tunnel the obstruction presented to trade by 

 a hill, or which renders commerce across a river 

 easy by the construction of a bridge. This same 

 community finds, moreover, that large quantities 

 of capital and labor must be expended along 

 lines where private individuals cannot be per- 

 suaded to invest it, since they can see no imme- 

 diate and sufficient return to them personally. 

 The state is in such cases the only hope ; and if, 

 by its incompleteness or weakness, it is unable to 

 respond to this demand, progress stops and retro- 

 gression begins. 



It is easy to see the bearing of this general view 

 of the economic functions of the state. It establishes 

 the primary importance of state action in eco- 

 nomic progress, and it claims for it a purely eco- 

 nomic character. So far from allowing that the 

 presumption is always in favor of non-interference 

 on the part of the state in economic matters, it 

 claims that in whole classes of economic processes 

 the presumption is strongly in favor of government 

 interference ; so strongly, indeed, that the mere 

 fact of government non-interference proves that 

 the community is living in a lower economic stage 

 than is within the grasp of its collective action by 

 state agencies. It vindicates for the collective 

 action of the community, within and through and 

 by the state, an economic function no whit less 

 fundamental, no whit less important, and in many 

 respects more far-reaching, than that hitherto ac- 

 corded to individual action. It is an idle attempt 

 to decide which is the more important of two 

 factors both of which are absolutely necessary to 

 the result. It is like trying to prove, that, of the 

 two lines which form an angle, one is more neces- 

 sary than the other. And yet this is what the old 

 school attempted to do in belittling the economic 



