HUMAN LIBERTY.

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXIII, Issue 3249, 6 February 1933, Page 7

HUMAN LIBERTY.

Where Hope Resides.

(By an Economist.)

When the Spaniards went to Peru they found a civilisation of the Incas —the Children of the Sun. The Incas had founded a great nation organised on rationalised civilisation in which poverty was unknown. The people were organised in classes and cultivated the soil or followed crafts by carefully established methods. The State was erected as the governor of every life, from the cradle to the grave. Even marriages were a matter of State regulation. Is some such condition to be the fate of all mankind? Are the minds and bodies of men to become the subject of searching limitations? Is human liberty to disappear from the earth in the name of progress? Are we to lose the little of freedom yet left to us? As one who loves organisation in its proper place, I hope and believe that there is an answer to these fears. It is very necessary, however, to understand where we are going, that we may take proper precautions. If we are to submit to regulations, let us understand their purpose. The great hope for human liberty in an age of organisation and machinery is this, that the organised part of life can be reduced to such comparatively small dimensions that the greater part of life can be set free. To understand this, let us return to the work of the peasant which was varied if hard. The life of the peasant entailed work from dawn till sunset, and still in our world to-day it entails such lengthy devotion. On the other band the labor of the organised worker has been shortened and can with better method be further shortened. Already in the world there is appearing the five-day working week, leaving two complete days of holidy. If, moreover, the work on each of the five days is shortened there is plenty of time left for individual recreation.

We can carry this a little further and imagine a condition of organisation which might be applied to what may be called the trades of necessity, leaving the trades of superfluity to the individual. We can picture a society in which the organised work of the adult fit people could easily provide the material framework and necessities of existence in a very short working day, so that the lives of men and women would be liberated to follow purely individual pursuits or pure recreation. In such a happy consummation, unemployment would be realised not as the curse but as the salvation of society. In degree as the hard tasks of society became organised as the occupation of a small fraction of the time of society, the body of the nation would benefit in increased leisure.

So the progress of mankind in work would have moved from the peasant life, occupying laboriously every moment of the day, to an educated and partly organised existence in which only a small part of the day would be given to work which must be done, leaving the larger part of the day to efforts expressing individual taste. Thus life might rise not merely to the diffusion of universal comfort, but to the possession of individual liberty in a degree undreamed of in days before work became organised. This is not to construct another Utopia, but to make deductions from present developments and possibilities. Let no one refuse to believe that that which is very good is impossible. Let us take new heart, and believe that a day will come when everyone will be able to say with experience and conviction, “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”