Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/293

Rh notion of equal reward for unequal work, or equal division of the products of industry, they seem to me covetous not only of the impossible, but of the unjust, the unreasonable, and consequently of the altogether undesirable. So long as men contend for such extravagancies the real vice of our civilization will be obscured. A social svstem which incorporates the assumption that a portion of society may righteously monopolize the productive forces of nature, so that other men must ask the permission of the monopolists to draw on the resources of nature, practically denies to the unprivileged class not merely a rightful share of goods, but an intrinsic claim to any share at all. In other words it establishes at least two castes among men, the caste of the propertied and the caste of the pauperized.

Failure to perceive the literal truth of these propositions is due to sheer weakness of imagination. We all understand that if a farmer is forced from his land, the law allows him no claim to any other land except a life lease of a place at the poor farm. We understand that if a weaver or a switchman loses his job no law compels another employer to hire him. Few men outside the wage-earning class have fairly taken in the meaning of this familiar situation. If a bookkeeper, or salesman, or teacher, or doctor, or lawyer, or minister be thrown out of employment, with no title to land, and no property in stocks controlling natural agencies, he is literally a man without a country. Whatever his personal ability to extract the supply of his wants from nature's resources, the opportunity is closed. He has no stock in nature. The resources of the world are divided up among the members of the propertied caste, and the remainder of men depend upon the members of this caste for permission to get a share of nature by labor in improving nature.

The improbability that the propertied caste will try to get along without the services of the pauperized caste, makes many of the latter indifferent to the terms of the tenure under which they occupy a place in the world. The dependence of many of them upon the caprice of their fellows is less direct than that of the wage-earner whose employment is subject to the will of a single