gaged in the industry have had their part taken over by machinery, it has been merely a question of time for those so engaged to find more humanising tasks and for the industrial world itself to be immensely enriched as a whole by the introduction of the machine.
Now to come to the legal aspect; and with this we can deal more shortly. The legal aspect arises from the fact that labour is a function exercised in the interests of the well-being of the community, and can make claims upon the community for the security and maintenance of that function, claims which the community as such must acknowledge and sustain, not merely for the sake of labour itself, but for its own sake. These claims are what we call rights, and the business of determining, asserting, and maintaining rights is undertaken by the state. The form in which those rights are prescribed by the state and recognized by the members of a state is what we call Law. A law is a regulation or universal condition laid down by the state in order to fix the relation between persons in the state in their pursuit of what all persons and powers in a society aim at—the well-being of the whole. Thus labour, having a position in society, in virtue of its effort to attain the common good, has necessarily rights on the one hand and legal conditions of existence on the other. These rights it must seek to find out and make good before the whole community, and these rights the state must, in the interests of the whole community, fix in definite shape and see carried out. Here, then, we have at once the justification for any and every attempt on the part of labour and labour associations to make their case and their position in the community understood. If this has to be done by means of opposition to other powers and interests, that must be accepted as a condition of the struggle. Opposition will be and must be offered, because finding our rights means in a sense finding our limitations with reference to others in the state; and we cannot find our limitations without rubbing against other people and other things. In the long run labour is bound to succeed in its effort to have its rights recognized and established by law; for failure to admit its claims is a standing peril to the harmony of the community, and prevents the
