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For two generations American political and economic life has been moving swiftly toward "bigness," toward monolithic organization. We live by, in, and among bigger and bigger corporations, bigger and bigger unions, bigger and bigger governments. On all sides individual freedom and responsibility have shrunk. Absorbed into organizations bigger than himself, the American tends to be overpowered by these organizations, whether of industry, labor or agriculture. And whatever his orientation, he must operate in and under an ever-expanding multilateral network of occupational and governmental regulation.In the shadow of such manifold giantism modern men—practically all of them employees who rate themselves "middle class"—seem but puny figures. Man's own handiwork has become a Frankenstein monster, destroying his initiative and individuality. In the grip of forces he has created, helpless single-handed to control, he suffers from loneliness, from not belonging, from impersonality. Millions who live in great cities, hundreds of thousands employed in assembly-line factories and organized in industrial unions, thousands of stockholders who can only endorse management's policies governing "their" billion dollar corporation —all these experience frustration, helplessness.

President Truman's stubborn determination to build on the New Deal's embattled foundations an imposing edifice called the Welfare State is stirring the business community and its spokesmen to renewed and outwardly bold hostilities. This present outcry for "welfare," it seems, is not what it used to be: "The irresponsible clamor of the mob for bread and circuses." "Welfare" is now recognized as "a justifiable demand, consonant with the necessities of social evolution," and in keeping with our political tradition. The old jungle economy, at long last, must be discarded. All this is now cheerfully conceded. But whose responsibility is it to bring order out of chaos, whose business is it to formulate and administer the welfare program? There is the rub. Certainly not government's, business leaders assert, for ultimately that would spell not a glorious welfare society but an inglorious welfare state. This ignominious prelude to statism, to totalitarianism, to despotism, must be avoided at all cost. That is why certain publicists, ex-New Dealers, industrial leaders and university officials are alerting the business community to a fresh responsibility, the unique venture of capitalism today—"the greatest opportunity in the world," Russell Davenport calls it, and peculiarly the concern of Free Enterprise.Harvard's Business School Dean, Donald K. David, also points ominously at "The Danger of Drifting," and sharply differentiates between "freedom to" and "freedom from," between "equality of opportunity and equality of results," etc., etc. These refinements are important, Dean David decides, because in them lies the crucial difference between welfare society (which he approves) and welfare state (which he deplores). How easy it is, he warns, to drift into the lethal arms of the welfare state. To foil the octopus of welfare, businessmen must be vigilant and aggressive. "Responsibility for this program," Dean David concludes, "is going to be placed in the hands of the businessman, because we have, whether some people like it or not, an industrial civilization; and the businessman, whether he likes it or not, has to assume new responsibilities."

Any economic system, whether systematic or not, involves a particular set of relationships between men and things and between men and men, and so needs the support of a corresponding legal and political system. One naturally expects political and legal change to follow social and economic revolutions. Perhaps that is the New Deal—a political and legal revolution to meet the demands of a new economic era. But whatever the situation may require to the mind of the Executive and Congress, there remains the question whether any particular legislative project is allowable under the Constitution. For our government, this matter of bringing law into conformity with economics meets with peculiar difficulties. It is not enough to secure rights by legislative enactment. Such guarantees must run the gauntlet first of administrative interpretation and ultimately of the courts. If one may judge from newspaper headlines, there is no surer way to bring our rights into controversy than to embody them in a statute.

It is common observation that progress in social sciences has not kept pace with mastery of natural sciences; that ability to deal effectively with modern industrial life offers a very poor parallel to the expertness with which scientific questions are considered. There are perhaps two explanations.First, research in mechanical, chemical, and electrical science has yielded, as by-products, a vast crop of new problems in human affairs. While invention and discovery created the possibility of releasing men and women from the thralldom of drudgery, new dangers to liberty appeared with the introduction of the factory system and the development of the business corporation. Large publicly owned corporations replaced small privately owned concerns; ownership of the instruments of production passed from the workman to the employer; personal relations between the proprietor and his help ceased. The individual contract of service lost its character because of inequality between employer and employee. Group relation of employee to employer, with collective bargaining, became common; indeed it was, in the opinion of some, absolutely essential to the worker's protection. These changes, in turn, called for ever-increasing governmental regulation. One result has been to emphasize anew the essential unity of economics, politics, and law.Second, progress in dealing with social matters has not kept pace simply because few men of talent and ability have bent their efforts to this field. It would be difficult indeed to point to any contributions to social research that begin to compare with those made by Steinmetz, Michelson, Millikan, Pasteur, and many others in the scientific field. Even seemingly elementary questions are still calling for solution. Is machine production, which tends more and more to exceed the possibilities of reasonable consumption, and to flood the world with goods for which there is not sufficient demand, to be restricted ? If so, how ? Why is our economic and political machinery so clumsy and inefficient that men are permitted to go hungry in the cities while wheat is being fed to hogs in the West? Why are factories closed when so large a percentage of the human race is undernourished, underclothed, and clamoring for jobs? Should unemployment be left to the hard settlement of supply and demand, or are unemployment insurance and the dole to be recognized and established by law as necessary features of the new world economy? Why, in the midst of so many labor-saving devices, is there so little leisure for the workers? How, in short, can men be taught to think more about human welfare and less about property and vested interests? How can the economics of production and distribution be reorganized so that everybody will have more of the good things of life and less of poverty, misery, and distress? It is certainly an extraordinary and challenging fact that our parents, with comparatively few of the conveniences and labor-saving devices that are ours, were nevertheless more contented, peaceful, and secure.

One does not speak of the rights of American trade unions glibly or in off-hand fashion. Unlike the English policy of defining the rights of labor by legislative enactment, our legislatures, both federal and state, have been particularly slow to make such definition. Such predicability as the labor law has thus far assumed has been largely the work of the courts. Here, in other words, we discover the rights of trade unions in the opinions of the courts; in England, we have been accustomed to look to the statute-book rather than to judicial opinions. Comparatively, English labor law has at least enjoyed the merit of being reasonably predicable. The acts of 1859, 1871, 1875, 1906, and 1913 were all designed either to make the existing law more definite or to overturn a judicial interpretation of the law adverse to labor. Thus, by the year 1927 the law was rather definite. The statutes contained statements of what labor could or could not do. A reading of the recent Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act of July 29, 1927, raises the question whether this legislation marks a change in the English policy of fixing the rights of labor by legislative definition.The immediate occasion for the recent act was the general strike of May, 1926. Introduced and rushed through Parliament by the present Conservative government, this measure failed to receive the preliminary study and consideration that preceded the introduction of the acts of 1871 and 1906.