A final problem in this same realm remains. The trade union, it is said, must obviously concern itself with all that touches the industrial conditions of its members. But it is not entitled to a general licence to roam all over the field of public activity. We should resent it if a football club passed resolutions upon the foreign policy of a government; and it is in the same way illegitimate for a trade union to deal with matters outside its sphere. The state, therefore, is entitled to define that sphere and to limit the activities of trade unions to matters that come within it. But I have already sought to show that such a definition of spheres is, in fact, impossible of achievement. Take, for instance, foreign policy. You cannot say that trade unions ought not to concern themselves with foreign policy since this is intimately bound up with economic policy which, in turn, is the chief factor in the determination of the conditions of employment. You cannot exclude any part of the economic realm from the trade union sphere. I should agree that a trade union ought not to concern itself, let us say, with the question of whether the Pope was justified in making the Immaculate Conception a dogma of the Roman Church; but the likelihood of a trade union acting in this way is as small as that of a football club concerning itself with foreign policy. We cannot legislate for the exceptional instance. Law can only deal with normal habits susceptible of logical reduction to well-established categories. When it goes further, it merely reveals its own impotence. A trade union, moreover, is a living body; and no law has ever been successful in coping with the growth of living things by legal promulgations upon the fact of growth. Many matters are regarded today as normally and naturally within the sphere of the trade unions which a generation ago, even a decade ago, most men would have insisted were in nowise their concern. In the American garment trade, the union concerns itself, as a vital part of its function, with the efficiency of the employers for whom its members work. A generation ago, this would have been dismissed as “an insolent interference with the rights of management”; today it is obvious that upon no other terms can the function of the trade union be fulfilled. In 1914 the unions would never have deemed it their business to concern themselves with the bank rate and credit policy; today they realize that these matters lie at the heart of their problems. Any such Procrustes’ bed of definition as this principle suggests seems to me, therefore, a quite wanton and foolish interference with freedom. V