Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/359

 SANITY IN SOCIAL AGITATION 34 1

be, and yet turn themselves into detonators of all sorts of social explosives, in the interest of they know not what.

As I have said, there are simply two parties of us in the world on this question, viz., first, the small contingent who believe there should be one rate of wages for an hour's work, for all sorts, conditions, and occupations of men ; and, second, the great mass of us, who for our lives can arrive at no common belief about an artificial scheme of distribution that would be absolutely fair to all, or even in the end more fair than the system which is evolving along with all other human institutions. Whatever our shade of opinion about possible checks and balances, in someway or other the law of supply and demand seems to us a factor that neither can nor ought to be thrown out of the calculation. Our suspi- cion is that this factor alone is bound to upset every theoret- ical scheme of equal distribution that will ever be invented.

For the great majority of men, therefore, who are in this state of disagreement about the fundamental conception of fair- ness in distribution, sanity in social agitation would not indulge in wholesale dogmatism, much less in wholesale denunciation. It would rather choose retail experiment with practical checks and balances. It would attempt to discover by experience what serves to secure more stable equilibrium among workers, and it would make this discovery a basis for further experience and experiment. It is quite possible for men who are as wide apart as the poles in philosophical theory to agree that a given wage scale is inhuman, and that pressure of some sort should be exerted to raise it. Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer would probably all agree that Mayor Harrison ought to be sup- ported in representing the taxpayers against the franchise-grab- bers. Orthodox political economists and radical socialists might easily stand shoulder to shoulder in an attack on sweat-shops, or in a fight against truck payments. We have discovered chances for some steps ahead in these directions, and we may rationally move on accordingly. But where we are not sure of the direction to take, discovery and not dogmatism is social sanity. For this reason I would say that the trade-union principle is thoroughly sound and sane. Such men as our friend, Mr. Nelson, too, are