employer alike, in that they hamper individual liberty and act in restraint of trade. The regulations, therefore, violate that system of law and order which rests on natural rights, although they may be enforced by that de facto law and order which is embodied in the mechanical standardization of the industrial
Trade-unionism is an outgrowth of relatively late industrial conditions and has come on gradu-
S30 THE THBOBT 07 BUSDTESS ENTERFKEBB
ally as an adapUtioa of old methods and working arrangements carried over from the days of handicraft and petty trade. It b a movement to adapt, construe, recast, earlier working arrangements with as little lesion to received preconceptions as the new exigencies and the habits of thought bred by them will permit. It is, on ita face, an endeavor of compromise between received notions of what " naturally " ought to be in matters of industrial business, on the one hand, and what the new exigencies of industry demand and what the new animus of the workman will tolerate, on the other hand- Trade-unionism is therefore to be taken as a somewhat mitigated expression of what the mechanical standardization of industry inculcates. Hitherto the movement has shown a fairly uninterrupted growth, not only in the numbers of its membership, but in the range and scope of its aims as well ; and hitherto it has reached no halting-place in its tentative, shifty, but ever widening crusade of iconoclasm against the received body of natural rights. The latest, maturest expressions of trade-unionism are. on the whole, the most extreme, in so far as they are directed against the natural rights of property and pecnitiary contract.
The nature of the compromise offered by tradeunionism ia shown by a schedule of its demands : . collective bargaining for wages and employment ;
CIVILIZATION AMD THE MACHINE PROCESS 331