THE COMING INDIVIDUALISM.*
LIBERTY is much in need of a champion in these days, and she has found a pair of apostles in Messrs. Hake and Weisslau, so uncompromising and thorough as to be ready not only to preach the doctrine of unrestricted Individualism, but to thunder it from the cannon's mouth, and to enforce freedom upon the peoples of the world, now enslaved, as they conceive, by prohibitions and monopolies devised by short- sighted State interference. Whether these writers are justi- fied in the adoption of their rather arrogant title is a question which will perhaps be settled in the next century ; but for the present it is enough that, though moderation is golden, the enthusiasm of an extremist is always far more interesting than the evenly-balanced platitudes of a thinker trained to moderation, and that this is all the more true when the extremist is waging an up-hill fight against the trend of contemporary opinion. This book aims at exposing the follies of State interference of all kinds,—Factory Acts, Pro- tective duties, Banking monopolies, Public-house Licensing, regulation of public amusements, and of everything else which modern notions expect the central authority to con- trol, and the result is a work which holds the reader's attention and interest from first to last, though it may not always command his assent to the propositions which it puts forward.
Messrs. Hake and Weisslan base their theories on the doctrine of the "solidarity" of humanity. It is a good doctrine, though it involves an ugly word, and there can be no doubt that by far the greatest revolution of modern, or ancient, times will have been brought about when mankind in general awakes to the fact that no nation or individual can prosper permanently at the expense of others. Isolated examples may appear to prove the contrary, bat it is obvious that no trader can expect to do a profitable business unless he has plenty of customers with money to spend, and that the only way in which they can make money to spend is by carrying on a prosperous business themselves. It is tedious to repeat these simple platitudes, but it is because they are rejected as dangerous fallacies that the prosperity of the world at large is cribbed, cabin'd,
The Co tiny diridnalient By A. 13 :wont Hake and 0 E Webulan. London: AJ obit ad Owls abs e.,,d Co.
and confined by protective reetrictions, which endeavour vainly to farther the welfare of particular peoples at the expense of those who ought to be encouraged to be their wealthiest customers. These protective restrictions imposed by foreign countries and the British self-governing Colonies are considered by our writers to be largely responsible for the ebb in the tide of prosperity which flowed so strong after the adoption of Free-trade by the United Kingdom. Internal meddling on the part of the State, however, has also done much, in their opinion, to retard commercial progress, and they point to the truth of John Bright's prediction, that "the Factory Acts would prove the thin end of the wedge of retro- gression." We must add that they are quite in agreement with the object of these Acts, but hold that "when natural 'circumstances are permitted to prevail, when the demand for workers exceeds the supply, and wages consequently are normal, Factory Acts will be rendered superfluous." The vigorous passage in which they sum up the heads of their indictment against the present tendency of politics is worth .quoting, as a good example of the earnestness, and perhaps exaggerated vehemence, with which they approach their subject
"The sentimental legislation, inaugurated by our democrats and sanctioned for party reasons by the bulk of our politicians, 'has driven hundreds of millions sterling out of the country, to be invested abroad in dangerous, and often ruinous, 'undertakings, instead of creating employment for British workers at home; it has persecuted industry to such a degree as to cause large works, and part of whole branches, to be removed to the Continent; it 'has protected the working man so well against employers as to cause thous /rids of the latter to withdraw from business and render employmeiat scarce. It has so supervised our factories that important branches of industry have been driven out of them to take refuge in the homes of the workers, where the work is accomplished under immense discomfort, at sweating wages, to 'the benefit of the numerous middlemen which the system in- volves; it has interfered with shipping with the result of causing British ships to be manned by foreign sailors, and even lately to be commanded by foreign officers. While politicians and agitators, • who claim to represent the democracy of the country, have thus inflicted on the masses of the people extreme suffering and privation by their sins of commission, and while they threaten to -aggravate matters enormously by the execution of their present programme, they have made themselves responsible for a far larger mass of evils by their sins of omission They have shortened many millions of good lives. They have caused thousands of suicides, tens of thousands of crimes, and hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation."
Hyperbole is not generally associated with a strong case, and it is a pity that Messrs. Hake and Weisslan should have -weakened the eloquence of their plea for non-interference by thus lavishly piling up the noughts at the end of figures which are evidently supplied by their own imagination. To remedy the terrible state of things thus described, which, by the way, is saot quite in accordance with the facts of the case—seeing that wages are high, prices are low, and the working classes never so well off—they write a long prescription, containing many 'doses, the most important of which is Imperial Free-trade.
Now there can be no doubt that if our self-governing Colonies could only be persuaded to strike the fetters off their commerce, an advance to prosperity "by leaps and bounds" would almost certainly ensue in the case of Colonial industry, similar to the great wave of improvement which swept over England -after the fiscal reforms carried out by Cobden and Bright.
'These reforms were accepted by the English people, as our writers acknowledge, not because it had, by a great intel- lectual effort, grasped the lessons of Political Economy, but because it was hungry and wanted cheap food. To the 'Colonials the question does not present itself nearly so urgently, and it is therefore probable that it may take some time before they can be brought to see the absurdity of trying to tax themselves into prosperity. Messrs. Hake and Weisslan would accordingly violate the principles of liberty, which is apparently less important than Individualism, by forcing Free-trade down the throats of our self-governing Colonies at the sword's point. They argue, if the word can be applied to such flimsy sophistry, that "to compel people to be free cannot be to interfere with their liberty, and to compel people to be prosperous cannot be called oppression."
Thus do they mar the effect of their brilliant exposition on the advantages of Free-trade, and the stupendous effect that its establishment throughout our Empire would have not only on ourselves and on that Empire, but on all the -rest of the civilised world, which would be directly benefited by our prosperity, on the principle of the solidarity of man- kind.
For internal ailments our practitioners have a patent medicine, which they describe as "Free Competition in the Supply of Capital to Labour." They consider that the dis- tress of the working classes is due to a certain extent to the restrictions placed by Government and Trade-Unions on commercial enterprise and freedom of contract, but chiefly to what they describe as the banking monopoly created by Peel's Act of 1844. It is more or less true that this Act practically established the Bank of England as the only bank empowered to issue notes, and this is the monopoly of which our reformers complain so bitterly. They do not seem to have studied the bibtory of banking to much purpose, for they speak of a "curtailment of the Bank's monopoly," which they appear to believe to have been brought about at the same time, as having "allowed the existence of many private banks in London." Private banks existed in London long before this period, Martin's and many others dating from the last century and earlier ; but our writers have confused them with joint- stock banks, which only came into being, in London, in 1834, and then not because of any Act, but because it was discovered that the Bank's privilege did not pre- vent the establishment of joint-stock banks of deposit in the Metropolis, as had hitherto been believed. Such technical errors are perhaps unimportant. but they make us less inclined to accept conclusions evidently based on in- adequate study. And the conclusion is not in itself attractive, since it is merely the doctrine that all banks should be allowed to issue notes without supervision or restriction of any sort. It is confessed that the Bank of England has been able to make no use of its monopoly, since "the note-circulation of the country is to-day slightly less than it was in 1814, when the business of the country was about one-sixth of what it is now," and it is also evident that the country is not short of coin, since the millions which have been recently sent to England have not gone into circulation, but lie in the vaults of the Bank. Our writers, however, believe that "an inexorable law prevents the increase of the coin circulating in a country." No such law exists, but they wish to defeat its imaginary effects by the free issue of notes to the labouring classes. They do not seem to know that bankers are only too glad to lend money to any one who can offer security, and to provide him with gold or a cheque-book, which are much more useful than unsupervised notes, which obviously could not he legal tender. Labour cannot get capital except by saving it, and never could, even if there were as many issuing banks as public-houses.
We have not space to deal with Free-trade in drink, amuse- ments, and other commodities, but must conclude by ex- pressing our regret that Messrs. Hake and Weisslan should have lessened the good effect of a very interesting book by their vehemence and wrong-headedness.
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