Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/182

168 feudal lords, forced upon the people the longing for a united government with adequate coercive powers, and the rapid changes in industry following the rise of commerce and manufactures, the introduction of money, and the fluctuations of prices, broke down the rule of custom, and permitted the king to infringe more and more uqonupon [sic] its precincts. Thus feudalism gave way to absolutism. The theory of absolutism made the will of the sovereign the sole law of the land, and the fiction arose that custom itself was law only on the ground that "what the king allowed he commanded."

Thus, in the rise of absolutism with the Tudors in England and Louis XIV. in France we have reached the culmination of the natural evolution of private property. The monarch or despot is the sole proprietor of all the land, and the administrator of public affairs. His will is now called law, because it controls many people of all classes. But in theory he is still a private proprietor, and in fact also, because the sanctions which he controls are exactly those corporal and privative sanctions controlled by the primitive proprietor. They have, however, in the process of centralization, become differentiated, as above indicated.

The following characteristics are now to be borne in mind in summarizing the foregoing rapid survey of the evolution of coercion:

1. The growth of monopoly, or exclusive jurisdiction. Professor Ward has pointed out that in animal and plant life the stage of free competition is only brief, incipient, and transitional, and that it terminates in "something that can very properly be called monopoly." "The tendency of every form of life, as soon as it acquires superior powers, is to drive out everything else and to gain a complete monopoly of the sources of supply that surround it." The human animal has become paramount in his particular environment in harmony with this general law governing all living things.

2. But in addition to the biological law of monopoly we find the sociological law of centralization. Herbert Spencer has