ividual welfare were one and the same; that all
that was needed for social progress was hard work, more machinery, more
saving of labor and a prudent limitation of the numbers of the
population.

The application of such a system to legislation and public policy was
obvious. It carried with it the principle of _laissez-faire_. The
doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its
applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that
the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that
strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the
pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages
and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large
extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of
germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The
poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the
sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except
the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing
this the economist could wash his hands of the poor.

These are the days of relative judgments and the classical economy, like
all else, must be viewed in the light of time and circumstance. With all
its fallacies, or rather its shortcomings, it served a magnificent
purpose. It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery
towards social freedom, from the mediaeval autocratic regime of fixed
caste and hereditary status towards a regime of equal social justice.
In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather
represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on
for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of
the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the
universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end
of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long
pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided us
in the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will at
any rate not be in the direction of a return to autocratic mediaevalism.

But when all is said in favor of its historic usefulness, the failures
and the fallacies of natural liberty have now become so manifest that
the system is destined in the coming era to be revised from top to
bottom. It is to these failures and falla