Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/172

 158 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

with his wealth of material products made by society for his use and enjoyment. The statement is highly ideal and elliptical, and represents the aim of private property, but omits its con- crete basis. The latter is simply some sort of control over the services of one's fellows by which they are moved to furnish him with the material means for his "satisfaction and expres- sion." This basic fact of private property is veiled by the wage system and the practice of purchasing commodities on a world market. But when we come back to its origin in wife-capture and slavery, we see it plainly as coercive control over others for one's personal satisfaction. In that primitive stage of appropri- ation it is plainly his servants who are the " extension of his own organs," " the constant apparatus through which he gives reality to his ideas and wishes." And, whereas, without these services, his only range of choice is that which is open to his own bodily and psychic powers, his new range includes the bodily and psychic powers of those who obey him.

But this is not all. Seeing that neither can he make a choice nor can his servant execute the same except as they both have knowledge and skill in the control of nature's forces and mate- rials, and seeing that this knowledge and this skill are mainly copied from others, it follows that choices and services are dependent upon the social progress up to this time in the technical processes. The master in commanding and the slave in serving simply use the tools or imitate the processes which they find already adopted around them. The slave is, therefore, the means of appropriating to his master the social products of his time. And this, indeed, is all the master wants. He does not care for the unwilling act of service in itself (except as it may increase his show of power), and would, perhaps, do away with it if these social privileges and products which he craves could come to him through another route when he merely wishes them.

We have, then, the following chain of facts and events: (l) the personal character of the master as the outcome of his heredity, education, habits, beliefs, prejudices, and so on ; (2) a wish, as the particular concrete component of his character; (3)