Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/511

Rh life, by education, popularizing art and guarding the integrity of the type of family best adapted to promote social welfare.

But the question about which the author seems to have been really most interested relates to the choice between anarchy and government in the industrial realm. Nearly half the book is devoted to this part of the inquiry. Mr. Salter's conclusions seem to be unimpeachable, but there is a surprising defect in his premises. He assumes—or rather he formally declares (p. 100)—that "while anarchy or liberty has passed away as regards the protection of life and property, and government is in its place, we live in an order of anarchy or liberty, substantially, as regards the industrial needs of the community." The further claim is that we have only to observe the present industrial situation to obtain inductive proof of the effects of liberty or anarchy. Mr. Salter decides after survey of present industrial conditions that liberty or anarchy in industrial affairs cannot be said to work well. The best that can be said is that the world somehow gets along under it.

If there is a single item of social analysis about which there is practical agreement, from the anarchist in the popular sense to the socialist or communist, it is that the present industrial regime is a reign of laws which restrict the liberty that they professedly promote. Complaints, modulated from violence down to mildness, harmonize in pronouncing our present system restrictive and repressive through laws pertaining to currency, banking, interest, taxation, inheritance, tariff, patent rights, corporate powers, etc. It would be difficult to find another critic of the present industrial situation who would accept Mr. Salter's description of our present condition as a state of industrial liberty or anarchy. There are enough who will go to the other extreme and call it a reign of legalized confusion, and there are few who do not declare that there is too much law of this or that sort—that is, too much abridgment of liberty.

A temperate judgment of our industrial institutions is that they are inventions intended to secure a certain conventional liberty, but that they result in numberless restrictions of real liberty. The conclusion properly to be drawn from a survey of present conditions is then that this system of restraint—government—cannot be said to work well, but that the world somehow gets along under it.

While, therefore, Mr. Salter's essay contains much that is suggestive and valuable, he appears to have sharpened one social perception by blunting another.