Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/833

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY 817

industry, free movement, free employment, free ownership of property, to enable individuals from the serf caste not only to be free from direct coercion, but also to break into the hitherto exclusive ranks of the ruling castes, and to share their indus- trial privileges. In China, too, with a weak state, slavery has run for centuries alongside freedom. But the European or American state, with its doctrines of right and its partnership of the capitalist and wage-earning classes, has both forcibly deprived the original slave- and serf-holding aristocracies of their private property in men, and has also given the latter equal privi- leges with the former, and in so doing has reshaped the industrial institution in such a way that indirect coercion and persua- sion mainly, instead of direct coercion, must be relied upon to induce work and to create wealth. By the abolition of slavery and serfdom all persons are made the property of the state instead of the property of private owners, and the state, using its coercive power as it sees fit, has adjusted them to each other in their work according to its ideas of right, constituting the familiar substantive rights of life, property, free contract, free movement, free industry, free use of public property and the gifts of nature, etc. Caprice is thus largely excluded from industry, and order and security take its place — indispensable conditions for that immense increase of production required by the increase of population, and producible only through methods of persuasion.

The state in the reflective period, thus extracting direct coercion from property owners, prepared the wav for the evolu- tion of the industrial institution upon its own material basis. It did this by breaking down the restrictions which subordinate industry to politics and religion, thus making possible new asso- ciations of men for industrial purposes alone. The rights of freedom made industry fluid, and prepared it to recrystallize around its own persuasive and material basis. The material basis thus prepared was private property in land and capital, which henceforth was to be free of acquisition to all, and trans- ferable. Here is a new basis for the industrial institution, enabling it to be separated out from other institutions and to