Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/362

 34 s THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and use knowledge of themselves and their resources that repre- sentative men h;ive gained. Social classes have been advance agents of prosperitv for the social mass. Powers and rights that aggressive classes have at first monopolized have gradually appeared to belong not to classes as such, but to men as such.

For example, the very abstract idea of individual rights them- selves, as distinguished from the privileges that belong to members of a class, had to be asserted and maintained in the concrete over and over again by a few, before it could be presented to the imagi- nation and then demanded as the proper possession of the many. Humanity was such a dull mass once that the individual was imperceptible within it. Castes separated themselves with their claims, and "rights," and "privileges." Families maintained separateness and dignity. Cities asserted independence of other cities and masters. Other groups got legal recognition such as church, monastery, university, or gild. Each of these had their "rights," but it was a long evolution before there was a definite notion of an individual, as having rights distinct from his share of the rights of his group.

We have a comparatively plain record of various steps by which this change took place. It appears, for instance, in the shifting of ideas that gradually demolished feudalism. It is com- mon knowledge that under the feudal system only a small per- centage of persons had socially recognized rights. These were the lords and their vassals, between whom there was a solemnly ratified compact. The great masses not in the feudally contracting class were without the pale of defined rights. Presently it was so evi- dently a good thing for the class with rights to have those rights, that many other people began to say to themselves " Rights are good things for those who have them. Being men like those people who have rights, why should we not have some too?" A by-product of this reasoning was a motion of rights as belonging to human beings, not to exceptional classes of human beings.

A similar progress is illustrated in the case of towns that got certain liberties from their masters. The liberties that the towns