es to any special individuals or
classes of persons or kinds of industry, for in this way capital and
labor will be diverted from the direction which they would naturally
take, and the self-reliance and energy of such favored persons
diminished.

Therefore complete individualism, universal freedom of competition,
was the ideal of the age, as far as there is ever any universal ideal.
There certainly was a general belief among the greater number of the
intelligent and influential classes, that when each person was freely
seeking his own best interest he was doing the best for himself and
for all. Economic society was conceived of as a number of freely
competing units held in equilibrium by the force of competition, much
as the material universe is held together by the attraction of
gravitation. Any hindrance to this freedom of the individual to
compete freely with all others, any artificial support or
encouragement that gives him an advantage over others, is against his
own real interest and that of society.

This ideal was necessarily as much opposed to voluntary combinations,
and to restrictions imposed by custom or agreement, as it was to
government regulation. Individualism is much more than a mere
_laissez-faire_ policy of government. It believes that every man
should remain and be allowed to remain free, unrestricted, undirected,
unassisted, so that he may be in a position at any time to direct his
labor, ability, capital, enterprise, in any direction that may seem to
him most desirable, and may be induced to put forth his best efforts
to attain success. The arguments on which it was based were drawn from
the domain of men's natural right to economic as to other freedom;
from experience, by which it was believed that all regulation had
proved to be injurious; and from economic doctrine, which was believed
to have discovered natural laws that proved the necessary result of
interference to be evil, or at best futile.

The changes of the time were favorable to this ideal. Men had never
been so free from external control by government or any other power.
The completion of the process of enclosure left every agriculturist at
liberty to plant and raise what he chose, and when and how he chose.
The reform of the poor law in 1834 abolished the act of settlement of
1662, by which the authorities of each parish had the power to remove
to the place from which they came any laborers who entered it, and so
far as the law was