We live in a time when great masses of civilized men have either voluntarily surrendered their liberties or at least have submitted without serious protest or resistance to the destruction of their personal liberties. It is important that we should understand the causes. This is not too difficult. For while a library of books might profitably be written on the subject, one fundamental aspect of the question at least is clear enough to anyone who passes back and forth between the totalitarian and the free nations of Europe.
It is this: The peoples who have lost their civil rights had previously lost or had never obtained the means of economic independence for individuals, families and local communities. It is very clear, I think, that the masses who have fallen under the spell of demagogic dictators and their terroristic bands were recruited from individuals who had no property, no savings, and either no job at all or a job which they could not feel sure of holding. They were in the exact sense proletarians even if they happened to be earning fairly high salaries at the moment, for they had no reserves to fall back upon. They could not afford to lose their jobs. They could not afford, therefore, to speak their minds or to take risks, to be in any real sense of the word individual citizens. They had to be servile or they starved. Wherever a dictatorship has been set up in Europe, the mass of individuals had already become so insecure that they no longer dared to exercise the legal liberties that the demagogue was attacking.
To have economic independence a man must be in a position to leave one job and go to another; he must have enough savings of some kind to exist for a considerable time without accepting the first job offered. Thus the peasant, for all his poverty and the exploitation which he suffers, is relative to his own needs still the freest man in central Europe. The fact that he can exist by his own labor on his own piece of land gives him an independence which every dictatorial regime, except the Russian perhaps, has been forced to respect.
But the industrial worker who has a choice between working in one factory and not working at all, the white collar intellectuals who compete savagely for the relatively few private positions and posts in the bureaucracy – these are the people who live too precariously to exercise their liberties or to defend them. They have no savings. They have only their labor to sell, and there are very few buyers of their labor. Therefore, they have only the choice of truckling to the powerful or of perishing heroically but miserably. Men like these, having none of the substance of liberty themselves, have scant respect for any law or any form of civil rights.
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The more I see of Europe the more deeply convinced do I become that the preservation of freedom in America, or anywhere else, depends upon maintaining and restoring for the great majority of individuals the economic means to remain independent individuals. The greatest evil of the modern world is the reduction of the people to a proletarian level by destroying their savings, by depriving them of private property, by making them the helpless employees of private monopoly or of government monopoly. At that point they are no longer citizens. They are a mob. For when the people lose this sense of their separate and individual security, they cease to be individuals. They are absorbed into a mass. Their liberties are already lost and they are a frightened crowd ready for a master.
Though the actual measures to be taken are debatable, the objectives for a free government are, I think, clear. It should use its authority to enable the independent farmer, the small and moderate-sized enterprise, the small saver, to survive. It should use its authority to see that large enterprises are no larger than technology requires, depriving big business of corporate privileges and other forms of legal and economic advantage which make it bigger than on economic grounds it needs to be. A resolute democracy should favor the dispersion of industry rather than its concentration, and it should favor the rise in as many communities as possible of different kinds of enterprise rather than a high degree of specialization on some one product. For unless the means of independence are widely distributed among the people themselves, no real resistance is possible to the advance of tyranny.