Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/517

 SYSTEM OF LABOR PENSIONS AND INSURANCE 503

then it is doubtful whether the title "ward of the government" would carry the distinction that it does in most parts of our country were it not for the periodic worship of the politician.

Any method of industrial amelioration to be successful in America must avoid the bureaucratic form of German methods, the patronal form of French methods, and at the same time the evil of English methods the degradation attaching to all recip- ients of collective relief in any form. Any such system must be founded upon the principles inherent in the Anglo-Saxon character, self-help and individual initiative. It must also be broader than this. It must include the German principle, the collective responsibility for a large proportion of individual abnormality, whether of lack of employment, injury, ill-health, old age, or other forms of invalidity. In other words the prin- ciple of labor insurance, inclusive of pensions, offers a basis for the betterment of social conditions. This is but a continuation of the principle of mutual aid formerly operative throughout all industrial groups, but during the present century operative, if at all, in mutually exclusive groups. The insurance principle is the most prominent contemporary expression of social inte- gration ; and social integration is a chief factor in social prog- ress.

The most valid objections to such propositions reduce them- selves to the charge that such development may be at the expense of social differentiation ; and it is not to be denied that in some respects various European projects are "returns to medievalism." Those compulsory forms that would develop a common social type and repress all individual variations, that hamper the mobility of labor, that destroy vast systems of vol- untary associations in the development of a bureaucracy are amenable to this charge. A condition of status is approximated and the future is heavily discounted. Hut this is not neces- sarily inherent even in compulsory forms, much less so in some modifications adaptable to American conditions.

This insecurity of livelihood of the laborer is responsible for the great mass of individual suffering and the non-progres-