make competition effective in the absence of mandatory restrictions. The like will hold of the business organization
(associated with the small industry. Both trade and industry were matters of personal efficiency
CL Aahley, Seonomle SiMory and Thtory, bk. n., e^wclftU;
BUSINESS IN LAW AND POLITICS 271
rather than comprehensively organized processes of j an impersonal character.' I
Natural rights, as they found their way into the conceptions of law and equity, were in effect the assumed equal rights of men so situated on a plane of at least constructive equality that the individuals concerned would be left in a position of effectively free choice if conventional restrictions were done away. The organization was not, mechanically, a close-knit one, in the sense that the concatenation of industrial processes or of business transactions was not rigorous either in point of time relations or of the quantity and character of the output or the work. Neither were the place, pace, circumstances, means, or hours of work closely determined for the workman or his employer by mechanical circumstances of the industrial process or of the market. The standardization of life under the old regime was of a conventional character, not of a mechanical kind such aa is visible in the more recent development. And this conventional standardization was gradually losing force.
The movement of opinion on natural-rights i ground converged to an insistence on the system of natural liberty, so called. But this insistence on natural liberty did not contemplate the abrogation of all conventional prescription. " The simple and obvious system of natural liberty " meant