Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/370

 356 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

by the king, had learned to combine together effectually and to secure for themselves a voice in shaping the sovereign will. No longer able to hold their earlier position as petty sovereigns, they could now become sovereigns over their own property only by sharing in the king's sovereignty, and securing through the House of Lords a veto on his arbitrary will. Here for the first time the state as such truly appears. A despotism is not a state. It is private property. Lawis the criterion of a state, but the arbitrary, transient commands of a despot are not laws. It is the capri- ciousness of private property that evokes the state. Economic and competitive conditions had finally centralized the coercive sanctions in one man. On such a large scale his caprice assumed ominous import. While private despotism was distributed among numerous proprietors, its social significance could not be seen. But centered in one man it became simplified, visible, and por- tentous. The subject of coercion has no will of his own. He is merely the limb of another. Different kinds of masters, the willful, the humane, the weak, the vacillating, and different moods of the same master, deprive the subject of moral character. He has no security for the future, no incentive to make much of himself or his interests. In other words, he has no property of his own. The effect on the master is pride, false estimates of self, immorality, caprice. Here is the double urgency for order in social affairs. The political problem which marks the genesis of order and the state begins in the attempt of social classes which have been subordinated on the basis of the coercive sanc- tions to coerce in turn the monarch, in order to set boundaries to his coercion and to secure private property for themselves. Magna Charta was imposed upon an especially capricious king, in the form of an agreement binding on him and his heirs not to extend his will beyond certain limits. It set forth channels within which king, barons, and people should each henceforth execute their personal wishes, without interference from others. It was a compromise, "a treaty of peace between the king and his people in arms."" It was in form a series of commands pur- porting to issue from the free will of the king, but, from the fact

'Taswell-Langmead, English Constitutional History, p. 102.