Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/357

 THE MEANING OF THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 343

every factory loft, and every crossroads store helps to increase unrest if not to accelerate motion. Aspiration to get on in the world makes slum tenements and frontier cabins headquarters of agitation. The people who were once hewers of wood and drawers of water, and were dumb at their occupation unless they were harried to desperation by some exceptional infliction, are today practiced coiners and utterers of social philosophies. Formerly only a rare few tried to take a bird's-eye view of what was going on in the world. As we say in sociological language, there was a very low degree of social consciounesss. The people who felt themselves parts of the great moving world as a whole were hard to find. Now there is a sort of feeling among the obscurest and most helpless people that they have the issues of life in their own hands. They are the source of power. They have but to say the word in sufficiently large numbers and the world will move as they order. The people who used to be called the rabble are now making their own appraisal of their social value. They are not abashed at the thought of steering the ship of state with their own hands. No vague awe draws invisible but impas- sable lines beyond which they must not step in pursuit of their desires. All sorts and conditions of men are saying with more than the bravodo of Macbeth, "What man dare, I dare ! " More than this, the increasing volume of social force has new leverages with which to exert its power. In the days of John Ball in England, or of the Bundschuh in Germany, the masses had merely the power of numbers. They had none of the tools of popular education, few means of communication, little political influence, no plausible pro- grammes, no power of organization, no allies to speak of in other classes. Today the same social elements have more knowledge than the average clergyman had in many periods of the Middle Ages. They give a living to crowds of crafty men for printing back at them their own provincial thoughts. They are learning to array themselves in effective political formations. They are pro- ducing and spreading programmes which have the merit of aim- ing at many things which it would be very comfortable to have. They arc cultivating mass sympathies and drilling themselves in