Individual liberty in any real sense implies much more than the restriction of governmental authority. In fact, true liberty consists, as we have seen, not in divesting the government of effective power, but in making it an instrument for the unhampered expression and prompt enforcement of public opinion. The old negative conception of liberty would in practice merely result in limiting the power of the government to control social conditions. This would not necessarily mean, however, the immunity of the individual from external control. To limit the power of the government may permit the extension over the individual of some other form of control even more irresponsible than that of the government itself--the control which inevitably results from the economic supremacy of a class who own the land and the capital. The introduction of the factory system forced the great majority of small independent producers down into the ranks of mere wage-earners, and subjected them in their daily work to a class rule under which everything was subordinated to the controlling purpose of the employers--the desire for profits. The significance of this change from the old handicraft system of industry to present-day capitalistic production is fully understood by all students of modern industry. Even Herbert Spencer, the great expounder of individualism, admitted that the so-called liberty of the laborer "amounts in practice to little more than the ability to exchange one slavery for another" and that "the coercion of circumstances often bears more hardly on him than the coercion of a master does on one in bondage."[180] This dependence of the laborer, however, he regarded as unfortunate, and looked forward to the gradual amelioration of present conditions through the growth of co-operation in production.