Modern socialists, including Marx, have simply produced a revised version of this same idea. For instance, Marx distinguishes various stages in the history of mankind: a first stage, in which the production relations had been those of cooperation, and a second stage, in which some people acquired for the first time control of the factors of production, thereby placing a minority in the position of being fed by the majority. The old Archbishop of Milan would say in less complicated and more effective language: “Nature is responsible for a law of things in common; usurpation is responsible for private law.”
Of course, we can ask how it is possible to speak of “things common to all.” Who decreed that all things are “common” to all men, and why” The usual reply given by the Stoics and their disciples, the Christian Fathers in the first centuries after Christ, was that, just as the moon and the sun and the rain are common to all men, so there is no reason to maintain that other things, such as land, are not also common. These advocates of communism did not bother to make a semantic analysis of the word “common.” Otherwise they would have discovered that land cannot be “common” to all men in the same sense in which the sun and the moon are and that it is therefore not altogether the same thing to let people cultivate land in common as it is to let them use moonlight or sunlight or fresh air when they go out for a walk. Modern economists explain the difference by pointing out that there is no scarcity of moonlight, while there is a scarcity of land. Notwithstanding the truistic nature of this statement, a purported analogy between scarce things like arable land and abundant things like moonlight has always been a good reason in the eyes of many people for maintaining that the “have-nots” have been “constrained” by the “haves,” that the latter have illicitly deprived the former of certain things originally “common” to all men. The semantic confusion in the use of the word “common” introduced by the Stoics and the early Christian Fathers in this connection has been retained by modern socialists of all kinds and lies, I believe, at the origin of the tendency, manifested particularly in recent times, to use the word “freedom” in an equivocal sense that relates “freedom from want” with “freedom from other people's constraint.”
This confusion is connected, in its turn, with another. When a grocer or a doctor or a lawyer waits for customers or clients, each of them may feel dependent on the latter for his living. This is quite true. But if no customer or client makes his appearance, it would be an abuse of language to assert that the customers or clients who do not appear constrain the grocer or the doctor or the lawyer to die by starvation. In fact, no one committed any constraint against him for the simple reason that no one put in an appearance. To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the customers or clients did not exist at all. If we now suppose that a client puts in an appearance and offers a very small fee to the doctor or the lawyer, it is not possible to say that this particular client is “constraining” the doctor or the lawyer to accept his fee. We may despise a man who can swim and does not save a fellow man whom he sees drowning in a river, but it would be an abuse of language to assert that in failing to save the drowning man he was “constraining” the latter to drown. In this connection I must agree with a famous German jurist of the nineteenth century, Rudolph Jhering, who was indignant at the unfairness of the argument advanced by Portia against Shylock and on behalf of Antonio in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. We may despise Shylock, but we cannot say that he “constrained” Antonio or anybody else to make an agreement with him—an agreement that implied, under the circumstances, the death of the latter. What Shylock wanted was only to constrain Antonio to respect his agreement after he had signed it. Notwithstanding these obvious considerations, people are often inclined to judge Shylock in the same way as they would judge a murderer and to condemn usurers as if they were robbers or pirates, although neither Shylock nor any ordinary usurer can properly be accused of constraining anyone to go to him to ask for money at a usurious rate.
In spite of this difference between “constraint,” in the sense of something actually done to cause harm to somebody against his will, and behavior like that of Shylock, many people, especially in the last hundred years in Europe, have tried to inject into ordinary language a semantic confusion the result of which is that a man who has never committed himself to perform a definite act in favor of other people and who therefore does nothing on their behalf is censured because of his purported “omission” and is blamed as if he had “constrained” others to do something against their will. This is not, in my opinion, in accordance with the proper usage of ordinary language in all the countries with which I am familiar. You do not “constrain” someone if you merely refrain from doing on his behalf something you have not agreed to do.
All socialist theories of the so-called exploitation of workers by employers—and, in general, of the “have-nots” by the “haves”—are, in the last analysis, based on this semantic confusion. Whenever self-styled historians of the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth century talk about the “exploitation” of workers by employers, they imply precisely this idea that the employers were exercising “constraint” against workers to make them accept poor wages for hard jobs. When statutes such as the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 in England granted to the trade unions a privilege to constrain employers to accept their demands by unlawful acts, the idea was that the employees were the weaker party and that they could therefore be “constrained” by employers to accept poor wages instead of high wages. The privilege granted by the Trade Disputes Act was based on the principle familiar to the European liberals of that time, and corresponding also to the meaning of “freedom” as accepted in ordinary language, that you are “free” when you can constrain other people to refrain from constraining you. The trouble was that, while the constraint granted to the unions as a privilege by the Act had the usual meaning of this word in ordinary language, the “constraint” that the privilege was designed to prevent on the part of the employers was not understood in the sense that this word had and still has in ordinary language. If we consider things from this point of view, we must agree with Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote in his Law of Torts that “legal science has evidently nothing to do with the violent empirical operation on the body politic” that the British legislature had thought fit to perform by the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. We have to say also that the ordinary use of language has nothing to do with the meaning of “constraint” that rendered it suitable, in the eyes of the British legislators, to inflict upon the body politic a violent operation of this kind.
Unprejudiced historians, such as Professor T. S. Ashton, have demonstrated that the general situation of the poor classes of the English population after the Napoleonic wars was due to causes that had nothing to do with the behavior of the entrepreneurs of the new industrial era in that country and that its origin is traceable far back into the ancient history of England. What is more, economists have often demonstrated, both by adducing cogent arguments of a theoretical nature and by examining statistical data, that good wages depend on the ratio between the amount of capital invested and the number of workers.
But this is not the main point of our argument. If one gives to “constraint” such different meanings as those we have just seen, one can easily conclude that the entrepreneurs at the time of the Industrial Revolution in England were “constraining” people to inhabit, for example, old and unhealthful houses only because they did not build for their workers a sufficient number of new and good houses. In the same way, one could say that the industrialists who do not make huge investments in machinery, regardless of the returns they can get, are “constraining” their workers to content themselves with low wages. In fact, this semantic confusion is fostered by several propaganda and pressure groups interested in making persuasive definitions both of “freedom” and of “constraint.”