Harold J. Laski

I believe, therefore, that, with all its difficulties and dangers, the area of local government should be as little circumscribed as possible.

The German system, of laying down what a local authority may not do, and leaving it free to experiment outside that realm of prohibition, seems to me superior both in principle and result to its Anglo-American antithesis.

Thereby we gain not only the knowledge which comes from varied social experiment, but the freedom born of citizenship trained in the widest degree to think for itself and to solve its own problems.

And even the impatient reformer ought sometimes to think whether, say, forcing a child-labour law on Georgia by federal amendment will lead to a genuine and whole-hearted application of its terms; whether, in fact, it will not persuade to…

Successful legislation is almost always legislation for which the minds of men are anxious; the channels of assent to it can rarely be dug too deep.

Everyone acquainted with the history of churches realizes the necessity of leaving them free to develop their own internal life.

On matters like ecclesiastical government, dogma, ceremonial, interference by the state is almost invariably disastrous in its results.

Bodies like the legal and medical professions are much better able to direct their own internal life than to have it directed for them by the state.

We ought to learn to think of industries like cotton and coal as entities not less real than Lancashire or New York, as capable, therefore, of being organized for the purpose of government.

It does not seem to me inconceivable that we should create a Parliament for the mining industry, in which capital, management, labour and the consumer, should each have their due representation, and to which should be confided the…

I should give to this Parliament a power of delegated legislation which would enable it to frame rules of conduct binding upon all the members of the industry.

Thus, while Georgia might refuse to pass a child-labour law, a particular industry in Georgia might refuse to allow its members to engage child labour in field or factory.

There might be developed in this way a body of industrial legislation and jurisprudence growing naturally out of the experience of those who participate in the operation of the industry, and imposed with a real sense of freedom because it…

Something of what it might effect, if planned in a wholesale way, the experiments of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad have amply demonstrated.

They show clearly, I venture to suggest, that an authority born of consent is always definitely superior to an authority born of coercion.

And the reason is the simple but vital one that creative energy is liberated only in the atmosphere of freedom.

For men, in fact, will not obey law which goes counter to what they regard as fundamental.

Their notion of what is fundamental may be wrong, or unwise, or limited; but it is their notion, and they do not feel free unless they can act by their own moral certainties.

Every generation contains examples of men who, in the context of ultimate experience, deliberately decide that an anarchy in which they seek to maintain some principle is preferable to an order in which that principle must be surrendered.

They illustrate the inescapable truth that law must make its way to acceptance through the channel of consenting minds.

Law is not merely a command; it is also an appeal.

Legal right is so made as the individual recipient of a command invests it with right; he gives it his sanction by relating it successfully to his own experience.

When that relation cannot be made, the authority of law is always in doubt.

And it is in doubt because, by contradicting the experience of those whom it seeks to control, it seems to them a frustration of their personality.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.