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 362 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sharing sovereignty with the monarch. They then became the aristocracy, and aristocracy, as a form of the state, is government by hereditary property.

With the further increase of population and the occupation of all the land, direct coercion was no longer needed, and was followed by freedom of labor and the wages system. Coercion here is indirect, and the sanctions are privative. Not the person of the laborer, but his means of subsistence, are owned. Instead of scarcity of men there is now scarcity of land, and economic value is transferred from men to land. The privative sanctions turn upon the power of proprietors to employ, pro- mote, and discharge the laborers. Since there is no escape to vacant land and no scope for outlaws, this control is effective. It could be met only by organization on the part of the newly freed men in the form of merchants' and manufacturers' guilds, joint-stock associations, corporations, and companies. These, gradually acquiring wealth, acquired influence in government through their lobbies, and finally were legalized and incorporated in the structure of government, thus constituting the representa- tive system. They acquired definite partnership in the English constitution with the Reform Bill of 1832. The characteristic feature of this new property interest, based on privative sanctions, is its transferability. It began in the free cities and later spread to the country. Labor is free and mobile, changing from one employer to another, and capital must also be free in order to go where it can get the richest results from the employment of labor. Government by this form of property is capitalism or plutocracy, and plutocracy is government by transferable property. Beginning on a small scale with small proprietors, this form of property tends to concentration in pools, combines, trusts, and monopolies, just as hereditary property tends to absolutism. Thus organized and centralized it strengthens its coercive control over all subordinates, over the community, and over the sovereignty in which it has acquired partnership.

The antagonism in England between aristocracy and plutoc- racy has resulted in the enfranchisement of the unpropertied classes, and in protective legislation in their behalf. In the