In modern times the tyranny of the group is more oppressive than the
tyranny of the individual and becomes more and more irresponsible. We
all suffer from the arbitrary powers of the Trade Union as consolidated
by the Trades Disputes Act, 1906, and of the limited company as built
up by successive statutes since 1862. The Trade Union interferes with
freedom of labour and contract, and the limited company system has
fostered, and at the same time, protectively concealed the activities
of the Trust. The ordinary member of a Trade Union has little power of
controlling its policy and the ordinary shareholder would be surprised
to learn that he was entitled to regard the director of a company as a
trustee for the shareholders.
That a Trade Union should not be responsible for its torts or that
a shareholder should have but a strictly limited liability for the
enterprise in which he invests, may appear common sense to the
ordinary mind. Nevertheless a stable society reposes on the general
responsibility of individual citizens for their acts. The industrial
conflict of to-day shows some recognition of all this. There are
tendencies towards giving even the unskilled workers in joint stock
enterprise some share both of profits and management, and this may
even extend so far as to relegate the capitalist to the position of a
debenture holder. Obviously, however, such a result would weaken the
hold of the Trade Unions in so far as it promoted peaceful co-operation
between capital and labour, and it would support the old-fashioned
alliance between English law and individual liberty. Strikes do not
occur in the legal profession because its position is established.
The Trade Union of the future may very possibly be no more obviously
militant than the Bar Council of the Law Society.
The successful working of smaller enterprises may often be more
efficiently conducted by the machinery of limited partnership as
provided by the Limited Partnership Act, 1907. The machinery of the
Act has been neglected by solicitors who are too indolent to study
it and by laymen who enjoy the pompous verbosity of a memorandum and
articles of association; but in time to come it should be extensively
adopted.
The State will have to exert eternal vigilance against the power of
private corporations such as the above; but it must also control
public corporations and its own departments and again quasi-public
corporations like the Bank of England. I fancy that the Banks and big
financial trusts will acquire more and more control of public policy
as well as of private business and that this trouble will have to get
worse before it gets better.