Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/291

Rh modern business as enemies of humanity than the fact that Washington owned slaves impeached his character as a patriot and friend of mankind.

My argument is with men who are able to see that if there are wrongs in our social system they are wrongs of ignorance and inattention as well as of willfulness. Such men must see too that the world has achieved a communism of responsibility for these wrongs. These men cannot have failed to perceive further that with all the obvious advantages of our present order there is at this moment the fatal offset of accelerated motion toward the industrial independence of a diminishing few, and the industrial dependence of the increasing many. This is something entirely different from the assertion that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. The two statements do not stand or fall together. We are passing through a social transition in which the power of a few men to control opportunities for employment is enormous, and the liberty of many men to defy the caprice of employers is correspondingly reduced. From the standpoint of a right thinking and of a right feeling man such contrast is intolerable. So far as it exists in any class of cases, it means nothing else than the subversion of the freedom of the dependent parties, and their retrogression into a unique and refined order of servitude. It is possible to consider such relationship a permanent feature of human society only on the assumption that the exercise of freedom, which is necessary to some men, is no part of the natural function of other men.

It will possibly be news to many men, who look from the calm heights of professional position upon the struggles of organized wage-earners, that only those children who inherit a title to land or its use are born into a legally protected right to earn a living. Other children may inherit money or equivalent personal property, and so long as it lasts the law will protect them in its use. Then they must apply, with the crowd born without inheritance, to those who possess the land, for the privilege of working in further support of life. They have no legal right to the pursuit of the occupation in which they have