Rights and Functions
A function may be defined as an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose. The essence of it is that the agent does not perform it merely for personal gain or to gratify himself, but recognizes that he is responsible for its discharge to some higher authority. The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man with things which are necessary, useful or beautiful, and thus to bring life to body or spirit. In so far as it is governed by this end, it is among the most important of human activities. In so far as it is diverted from it, it may be harmless, amusing, or even exhilarating to those who carry it on, but it possesses no more social significance than the orderly business of ants and bees, the strutting of peacocks, or the struggles of carnivorous animals over carrion.
Men have normally appreciated this fact, however unwilling or unable they may have been to act upon it; and therefore from time to time, in so far as they have been able to control the forces of violence and greed, they have adopted various expedients for emphasizing the social quality of economic activity. It is not easy, however, to emphasize it effectively, because to do so requires a constant effort of will, against which egotistical instincts are in rebellion, and because, if that will is to prevail, it must be embodied in some social and political organization, which may itself become so arbitrary, tyrannical and corrupt as to thwart the performance of function instead of promoting it. When this process of degeneration has gone far, as in most European countries it had by the middle of the eighteenth century, the indispensable thing is to break the dead organization up and to clear the ground. In the course of doing so, the individual is emancipated and his rights are enlarged; but the idea of social purpose is discredited by the discredit justly attaching to the obsolete order in which it is embodied.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the new industrial societies which arose on the ruins of the old regime the dominant note should have been the insistence upon individual rights, irrespective of any social purpose to which their exercise contributed. The economic expansion which concentrated population on the coal-measures was, in essence, an immense movement of colonization drifting from the south and east to the north and west; and it was natural that in those regions of England, as in the American settlements, the characteristic philosophy should be that of the pioneer and the mining camp. The change of social quality was profound. But in England, at least, it was gradual, and the “industrial revolution,” though catastrophic in its effects, was only the visible climax of generations of subtle moral change. The rise of modern economic relations, which may be dated in England from the latter half of the seventeenth century, was coincident with the growth of a political theory which replaced the conception of purpose by that of mechanism. During a great part of history men had found the significance of their social order in its relation to the universal purposes of religion. It stood as one rung in a ladder which stretched from hell to Paradise, and the classes who composed it were the hands, the feet, the head of a corporate body which was itself a microcosm imperfectly reflecting a larger universe. When the Reformation made the Church a department of the secular government, it undermined the already enfeebled spiritual forces which had erected that sublime, but too much elaborated, synthesis. But its influence remained for nearly a century after the roots which fed it had been severed. It was the atmosphere into which men were born, and from which, however practical, or even Machiavellian, they could not easily disengage their spirits. Nor was it inconvenient for the new statecraft to see the weight of a traditional religious sanction added to its own concern in the subordination of all classes and interests to the common end, of which it conceived itself, and during the greater part of the sixteenth century was commonly conceived, to be the guardian. The lines of the social structure were no longer supposed to reproduce in miniature the plan of a universal order. But common habits, common traditions and beliefs, common pressure from above gave them a unity of direction, which restrained the forces of individual variation and lateral expansion; and the center towards which they converged, formerly a Church possessing some of the characteristics of a State, was now a State that had clothed itself with many of the attributes of a Church.
The difference between the England of Shakespeare, still visited by the ghosts of the Middle Ages, and the England which merged in 1700 from the fierce polemics of the last two generations, was a difference of social and political theory even more than of constitutional and political arrangements. Not only the facts, but the minds which appraised them, were profoundly modified. The essence of the change was the disappearance of the idea that social institutions and economic activities were related to common ends, which gave them their significance and which served as their criterion. In the eighteenth century both the State and the Church had abdicated that part of the sphere which had consisted in the maintenance of a common body of social ethics; what was left of it was repression of a class, not the discipline of a nation. Opinion ceased to regard social institutions and economic activity as amenable, like personal conduct, to moral criteria, because it was no longer influenced by the spectacle of institutions which, arbitrary, capricious, and often corrupt in their practical operation, had been the outward symbol and expression of the subordination of life to purposes transcending private interests. That part of government which had been concerned with social administration,
