"...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use o… - Karl Polanyi

One might suppose that freedom of production would naturally spread from the purely technological field to that of the employment of labor. However, only comparatively late did Manchester raise the demand for free labor. The cotton industry had never been subject to the Statute of Artificers and was consequently not hampered either by yearly wage assessments or by rules of apprenticeship. The Old Poor Law, on the other hand, to which latter-day liberals so fiercely objected, was a help to the manufacturers; it not only supplied them with parish apprentices, but also permitted them to divest themselves of responsibility towards their dismissed employees, thus throwing much of the burden of unemployment on public funds.

The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity. Reactionary paternalism had in vain tried to resist this necessity. Out of the horrors of Speenhamland men rushed blindly for the shelter of a utopian market economy.

Under conditions such as these the routine conflict of interest between employers and employees took on an ominous character. While a divergence of economic interests would normally end in compromise, the separation of the economic and the political spheres in society tended to invest such clashes with grave consequences to the community. The employers were the owners of the factories and mines and thus directly responsible for carrying on production in society (quite apart from their personal interest in profits). In principle, they would have the backing of all in their endeavor to keep industry going. On the other hand the employees represented a large section of society; their interests also were to an important degree coincident with those of the community as a whole. They were the only available class for the protection of the interests of the consumers, of the citizens, of human beings as such, and, under universal suffrage, their numbers would give them a preponderance in the political sphere. However, the legislature, like industry, had its formal functions to perform in society. Its members were entrusted with the forming of the communal will, the direction of public policy, the enactment of long-term programs at home and abroad. No complex society could do without functioning legislative and executive bodies of a political kind. A clash of group interests that resulted in paralysing the organs of industry or state—either of them, or both—formed an immediate peril to society.