The Need for Government Interference.

It may, indeed, be contended that the prevention of excessive hours of labor is one of the essential duties of Government in an advanced industrial community. It is universally admitted to be the primary duty of Government to prescribe the plane on which it will allow the struggle for existence to be fought out. Of course, the fittest to survive under the given conditions will inevitably survive, but the Government does much to determine the conditions, and therefore to decide whether the fittest, by the test of conflict, shall be also the best then and there possible. We have long ruled out of the conflict the appeal to brute force, thereby depriving the strong man of his natural advantage over his weaker brother. We stop, as fast as we can, every development of fraud and chicanery, and so limit the natural right of the cunning to overreach their neighbors. We prohibit the weapon of deceptive labels and trade-marks. In spite of John Bright's protest, we rule that adulteration is not a legally permissible form of competition. We forbid slavery : with Mill's consent, we even refuse to uphold a life-long contract of service. The whole history of Government is, indeed, one long series of definitions and limitations of the conditions of the struggle, in order to raise the quality of the fittest who survive. This service can be performed only by Government. No individual competitor can lay down the rules for the combat. No individual can safely choose the higher plane, so long as his opponent is at liberty to fight on the lower. The honesty which is the best policy is merely just so much honesty as will not let you fall flagrantly out at elbows with your neighbors It .is for the citizens collectively, through their representatives in Parliament, to do what neither the employers nor the employed can do individually. Law is but the expression of the common will, and there is no reason why it should not express our common will as to the hours of our labor, just as it does our common will on other points.

It may, however, be admitted that the demand, which has marked the present century, for a more general regulation of the hours and conditions of labor, does represent a marked advance upon previous conceptions of the sphere of legislation. Such an extension of collective activity is, it may safely be asserted, an inevitable result of political Democracy. When the Commons of England had been granted the right to vote supplies, it must have seemed an unwarrantable extension that they should claim also to redress grievances. When they passed from legislation to the page 14 exercise of control over the Executive, the constitutional jurists were aghast at their presumption. The attempt of Parliament to seize the command of the military forces led to a civil war. Its authority over foreign policy is scarcely two hundred years old. Every one of these developments of the collective authority of the nation over the conditions of its own life was denounced by great authorities as an illegitimate usurpation. Every one of them is still being resisted in countries less advanced in political development. In Russia, it is the right to vote supplies that is denied : in Mecklenburg, it is the right freely to legislate; in Denmark, it is the control over the Executive; in Germany, it is the command of the army; in Austria, it - is the foreign policy of that composite Empire. In the United Kingdom and the United States, where all these rights are admitted, the constitutional purists object to the moral competence of the people to regulate, through their representatives in Parliament, the conditions under which they work and live. Although the tyranny which keeps the tram-car conductor away from his home for 17 hours a day is not the tyranny of king, or priest, or noble, he feels that it is tyranny all the same, and seeks to curb it as best he can. The step which these Anglo-Saxon communities are taking unavowedly, and often unconsciously, a smaller Republic expressly enshrines in its constitution. The Swiss Federal Constitution explicitly declares the competence of the legislature to enact statutes "relating to the duration of the work which may be imposed upon adults." The English workman now demands a similar advance.