[
234 ] The Great Transformation
separate the people from power over their own economic life. The
American Constitution, shaped in a farmer-craftsman's environment
by a leadership forewarned by the English industrial scene, isolated the
economic sphere entirely from the jurisdiction of the Constitution,
put private property thereby under the highest conceivable protec-
tion, and created the only legally grounded market society in the
world. In spite of universal suffrage, American voters were powerless
against owners.*
In England it became the unwritten law of the Constitution that
the working class must be denied the vote. The Chartist leaders were
jailed; their adherents, numbered in millions, were derided by a legis-
lature representing a bare fraction of the population, and the mere de-
mand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authori-
ties. Of the spirit of compromise allegedly characteristic of the British
system—a later invention—there was no sign. Not before the working
class had passed through the Hungry Forties and a docile generation
had emerged to reap the benefits of the Golden Age of capitalism; not
before an upper layer of skilled workers had developed their unions
and parted company with the dark mass of poverty-stricken laborers;
not before the workers had acquiesced in the system which the New
Poor Law was meant to enforce upon them was their better-paid stra-
tum allowed to participate in the nation's councils. The Chartists had
fought for the right to stop the mill of the market which ground the
lives of the people. But the people were granted rights only when the
awful adjustment had been made. Inside and outside England, from
Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant
liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy
was a danger to capitalism.
The experience of the labor issue was repeated on the currency is-
sue. Here also the 1920s were foreshadowed by the 1790s. Bentham was
the first to recognize that inflation and deflation were interventions
with the right of property: the former a tax on, the latter an interfer-
ence with, business^ Ever since then labor and money, unemployment
and inflation have been politically in the same category. Cobbett de-
nounced the gold standard together with the New Poor Law; Ricardo
* Hadley,A. T.,
Economics: An Account of'the Relations between Private Property and
Public Welfare, 1896.
1
Bentham, J.,
Manual of Political Economy, p. 44, on inflation as "forced frugality";
p. 45 (footnote) as "indirect taxation." Cf. also
Principles of Civil Code, Ch. 15.