Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/364

 350 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

I repeat, then, that the social movement throughout history has been an instinctive effort to get for more men the things that have seemed to be good for some men. The social move- ment of today is in one view only the latest episode in this inces- sant effort. In another view there are distinguishing character- istics of the incident, which call for special notice.

First, then, things that were supposed to be assured to all Americans a hundred years ago, today seem to many to be in jeopardy. When our fathers framed the Declaration of Inde- pendence they thought it "self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Among these rights they thought there was no room for question about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The case is distinctly different now. Not that the theory has changed, but conditions have changed so that thousands of men distinctly believe and other thousands vaguely suspect that the latest gains in civilization have clouded the title of the average man to life, liberty, and free pursuit of happiness. The social movement of today is in great part a desperate struggle to save what seems to have been lost in the industrial revolution. The toiling millions can buy with their wages more comforts than they ever could before. The laboring class, as a class, is more necessary to civilization than ever. The individual laboring man today, however, is haunted by the thought that he may any day lose his job. He feels that he has less certainty of keeping him- self and family from starvation or pauperism than the average American slave had of living in comfort through old age. The free man's freedom today is evidently a struggle with severer and more relentless contingencies than slaves as a class have encoun- tered in civilized countries in modern times. Men are accord- ingly beginning to feel that the wide wide world is a very crowded place, and that its accommodations are not as free as they used to be. Somehow a great deal of the space has been spoken for in advance by people who hold it in reserve for themselves and their friends. We find ourselves very seriously playing the old game of "goals." There are fewer goals than