Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/614

 594 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

draw water all their lives in the service and for the benefit of others, or can doubt that they will be less and less willing to cooperate as subordinate agents in any work when they have no interest in the result, and that it will be more and more difficult to obtain the best work-people, or the best service of any work- people, except on conditions similar in principle to those of M. Leclaire. Although, therefore, arrangements of this sort are now in their infancy, their multiplication and growth, when once they enter into the general domain of popular discussion, are among the things which may most confidently be expected."'

The gravity of the condition here set forth is not overesti- mated. Nor has it become any less critical since the days when Mill wrote ; rather the reverse. And yet the concluding sentence must be classed with the many other unfulfilled prophecies of eco- nomics and other social sciences, all illustrative of the extreme unreliability of social prevision in the present stage of social knowledge. Such failures of prophecies do not detract from the motives prompting them, nor from the wisdom of the author, but do emphasize the fact, to which conclusion we must come, that profit-sharing, however commendable in isolated instances, is of very limited applicability under our present industrial sys- tem, and offers no adequate means of escape from that system.

A discussion of profit-sharing still earlier than Mr. Mill's is that of Charles Babbage in his Economy of Manufactures. By some this is held to be the origin of the idea. The prophetic element of this discussion had a more happy outcome than many such, for there have been many realizations of the system here expounded as ideal.

It has been held that the " academic " influence upon the cooperative movement has been injurious ; even the influence of its friends. But the reverse is certainly true of profit-sharing. Most extensively advertised and most highly commended by nearly all the systematic economists since Mill, it owes to them much of its strength, at least its publicity and the general favor in which it is held.

Mr. Mill's opinion is still the general one. General Walker,

'J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, chap. 7.