Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/103

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 9!

upright man, but as a personal foe." There was "nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich." "The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more com- pletely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life .... in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its scale, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property."

The misery of the multitude was such that free men not infrequently sold themselves to the contractors for board and wages as gladiatorial slaves. The obsequiousness of legal rela- tions to economic realities appears from the fact that the juris- consults of the period pronounced lawful and actionable the con- tract of such a gladiatorial slave "to let himself be chained, scourged, burned, or killed, without opposition, if the laws of the institution should so require."

Changes in taste, the growth and redistribution of population, the shifting of trade routes, mechanical inventions, discovery of natural deposits, or increase in local security, cause wealth to well up at new spots or to come into new hands. If it is true that capital is a primitive kind of power which may be trans- muted and differentiated into nearly all forms of the Desirable, then New Wealth will be pregnant with social change. Such, indeed, is the fact. The first full-fledged aristocracy is based on agricultural profits, for among the sources of early revenue land alone possesses that stability which is necessary in order that the merely rich may ripen into a true nobility. If, however, by the side of the blue-blooded territorial aristocracy there forms a con- siderable body of plebeian rich, the social structure is at once subject to a strain which sooner or later will modify it. It mat- ters not whether the source of these fortunes be piracy, commerce, manufacture, colonial exploitation, tax-farming, or finance; money is power and ultimately contrives to register itself in super- economic forms. The fall of the Greek aristocracies was due to the fortunes made in commerce, navigation, and manufacture. The Eupatrids, absorbed in war and politics and content to leave the