equally to all. It is not so important what the rules are as it is to have them affect all alike. There are many ways in which this condition is violated.

III. THE MOBILITY OF CAPITAL AND LABOR'

In the case of capital, it is clear that under no exigency could the plant of a flour-mill be converted into machinery for making bicycles. It may be granted also that the complexity of industry and the hugeness of the tasks it undertakes lead to more and more of the country's wealth being invested in fixed and specialized capital and so made incapable of adaptation.

But capital itself as a whole is much more mobile than labour as a whole.

1. Though millstones will not make bicycles, many of the largest categories of capital may, within tolerably wide limits, be converted from one purpose to another; for instance, buildings, steam-engines, horses, etc.

2. The mobility of capital is secured from the side of the new supply, and here, again, we have a suggestive comparison between it and labour.

a) Wealth is increasing very much faster than population, and the form which this wealth will take as it comes into the world is in the hands of people who have every motive to give it the shape which will find the most profitable investment. And, again, there is always a fund of inchoate capital which can be materialised in any form wanted. The forges and machine shops of the country, for example, are full of stock-steel bars, plates, tubes, etc.-which may be directed, at a week's notice, to the making of any kind of machinery. But while capital can take any shape, labour can take only one. A man rises up, works, and lies down in his own skin. Labour, as was said, is always prisoned in the body of the labourer.

b) As fixed capital wears out, its replacements need not take the old form. The progress of invention and improvement seldom allow that old machinery is replaced by machinery exactly the same. The worst that can happen to it is that it stops and is sold for what it will bring, and no more of that kind of capital is produced. But the labourer's children are made in his own image. Though his sons

Adapted by permission from William Smart, The Distribution of Income, pp. 174-85. (Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1899.)

may be superfluous, he does not stop producing the same kind of man as he himself was.

But probably the mobility of labour-the power of free movement from trade to trade is greater than any empirical observation would suggest. No agricultural depression, of course, will ever drive farmlabourers into watchmaking. But agricultural labourers take to the coalpits when inducement is offered. And, by the nature of their work, watchmakers might pass freely enough into the other occupations requiring fine fingering and the use of delicate tools.

It is generally argued that the evident tendency of modern industry, as of modern scholarship, is toward specialization, and that specialization is an almost insuperable obstacle to mobility. But the modern development of machine tools has brought an escape from this dreary outlook in the fact that very much the same kind of skill is required for tending one kind of machine tool as for tending another. The fact seems to be that the universal spread of machinery requiring only skill in machine-minding tends to make labour more mobile, at the same time as it makes mobility more necessary. If one looks over the field of labour and sees the desperate efforts that are being made in most of the crafts to prevent the intrusion of outsiders who have never passed the recognised gate of apprenticeship, but yet are found quite capable of doing the work to which the Trade Union protests a "right"—even if we consider only one part of the same movement, the pressing of women workers into trades hitherto held sacred to men-it is difficult to resist the conclusion that in the near future the competition which will attract notice is not the competition between capital and labour, but the inter-competition of the various grades. of labour.

If, however, we looked for mobility only in the movement of adult labour, we should be disappointed. But there are two other considerations which must be taken into account.

1. Where there is cheap and rapid transit, and where newspapers and other agencies keep people informed of the conditions of work and wages, there need not be actual movement to secure its levelling effects. After all, the meaning of mobility is power to move, and the threat of movement is sometimes enough to secure the worker against arbitrary payment.

2. Where there is no mobility of the labourer there may be and is mobility of labour. Perhaps it is not sufficiently realised that the supply of labour must be a continuous stream. To maintain its

numbers every trade requires to be constantly recruited, and to meet the demands of growing population and growing wealth most trades require a constant addition to their numbers. Remembering this constant need of accessions, it is clear that the direction of young workers to one group of occupations means actual decrease of numbers in the other groups, and the growing competition in one group has its counterparts in the slackening of competition in the others. At any moment the population under ten years of age is nearly a quarter of the whole. In times when riveters are "past their best" at the age of forty, and there are "no men available" in the shipbuilding industry after forty-five, the effect of this stream of recruits constantly coming forward goes far to redress the immobility of the adult workers.

II2. WHAT MOBILITY REALLY INVOLVES

Απ

In the first place, it may be remarked that, in order to secure an effective industrial competition-such a competition as shall bring rewards into correspondence with sacrifices-it is not necessary that every portion of capital, or that every laborer, should be at all times capable of being turned to any selected occupation. It is enough that a certain quantity of each agent-varying according to circumstances should be thus flourishing, and to be realizing exceptional gains there is no need that the whole industry of the country should be disturbed to correct the inequality. A small diversion of capital and labor-small, I mean, in comparison with the aggregate embarked in any important industry-will in general suffice for the purpose. Even on extraordinary occasions, when unlooked-for events in the political or commercial world disturb ordinary calculations and give an enormous advantage to particular industries-such occasions, for example, as occurred in the early years of railway enterprise, or, again, in the linen trade on the breaking out of the American Civil War even on such occasions the equilibrium of remuneration and cost can always be restored, not, indeed, in a moment, but after no long delay, through the action of labor and capital still uncommitted to actual industrial employment, and without any sensible encroachment on the stock already actively employed. All that is necessary, therefore, with a view to an effective industrial competition, is the

Taken by permission from J. E. Cairnes, Political Economy, pp. 61-63. (Harper & Bros., 1878.)

presence in a community of a certain quantity of those instruments of production existing in disposable form, ready to be turned toward the more lucrative pursuits, and sufficiently large to correct inequalities as they rise. Now, it will not be difficult to show that this condition is fulfilled in many industrial communities, completely in the case of capital, and less perfectly, but still within certain limits really and effectually, in the case of labor also.

"What are the equal opportunities which every Englishman requires today in order to secure real liberty of self-development?"

It is, I think, plain that in the front of his charter of individual liberty comes the right of every man to an equal share with every other in the use of the land and of the other natural resources of his native country. This right, if it has been alienated or compromised, must be restored.

Now, what does equality of opportunity demand in relation to the land? Evidently not that every man shall have an equal-sized parcel of land assigned to his exclusive use, for that would be impracticable. What is required is that any man who wants the use of a bit of land which he is fit to work shall have an equal chance with every other man of getting and of keeping it, on terms regulated by a public authority and not a private owner; and that every man can on similar terms get a fixed home to live in without the liability of being turned out at the will of another.

Let us take one form of modern liberty which is in part a land question. The right to move unhindered from one place to another is as much an element of freedom as the right to stay where you are. If a man is to make the best use of his faculties, he must be free to take himself and his belongings from where he is to where he wants to be. Mobility is more and more essential to freedom in our modern industrial system where local industrial conditions are continually changing, and where everyone must be able to follow his trade and to open up new markets for his personal skill or his products.

That this mobility belongs to individual liberty is indeed embodied in the most hallowed maxim of the individualist philosopher, laissezfaire, laissez-aller. But to tell a man he has this right, this liberty to go,

1

Adapted by permission from J. A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism, pp. 97-109. (P. S. King & Son, Ltd., 1909.)

is not to give it to him. The freedom to walk along the highroad is not the real mobility required for modern life. Effective liberty to travel involves the use of railroads, which in substance are our national highways. Now, an ordinary labourer, obliged to bargain with a private company for carriage, and disabled by his narrow means from moving easily, quickly, or far at a time, is in fact deprived of an opportunity essential to his full liberty of choice in life and work, and society is also the loser by this limitation of his power. Absolutely free transit may not be attainable or advisable, but a national railway system, which, by its cheap rates and quick, frequent service, enables every man to move to and from his work without waste of time or money, and to follow his economic opportunities wherever they may lead him, is necessary today to "free" men in a "free" country. And what holds of persons holds of the produce of their labour.

Then comes another issue of modern liberty which also has its roots in Nature and man's equal access to natural powers. For most purposes of organized industry the use of some non-human energy is necessary: civilization more and more implies the liberation of the muscular and nervous powers of man from heavy routine work and the substitution of mechanical energy. In large provinces of industry the time has come when the success or failure of a man to establish himself in business, and to make a living wage or profit, depends upon the terms upon which he can get cheap and reliable access to this energy. Liberty of trade demands the public ownership and operation of industrial power for sale on equal terms to all who want it.

The use of capital on fair and equal terms is in this country essential to every man who wishes to live, not as a wage- or salaryearner, but as an independent producer or trader. For such purpose credit is capital, and no man is "free" to use his business skill unless he can get a reasonable amount of credit upon easy terms. There are two purposes for which a worker or a small business man wants an occasional advance of money. One is to meet some unforeseen emergency in his business or his private life against which adequate insurance is impossible. The other need of credit is, not to meet an emergency, but to seize an opportunity. It is sometimes supposed that only a big man with large resources can set up in business today with any reasonable prospect of success. But this general supposition is unwarranted. Even in some of the staple manufactures it