Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/848

 832 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

know and can trace its history, and see how, under all the circumstances, it could not have been otherwise. Pecuniary value is the result of natural causation, like everything else, but the series of terms consists of a long winding labyrinth of causes and effects that have ultimately produced sometliing which, looked at directly, appears irrational and absurd. In this it is no exception to the general law of survivals in ethnology. Every lawyer knows what a legal fiction is, but most of them are mistaken in imagining that only advanced races are capable of creating such fictions. The study of ethnology shows that early institutions are a mass of fictions. The savage is more logical than the civilized man. Analyze the couvade, considered as the fiction by which the matriarchal was transformed into the patriarchal system without a break in the chain of logic.

Pecuniary value, as distinguishhed from intrinsic value, is a survival, and it has probably never before been so well traced out. Here are a few of the steps, but the book must be read to see them all and how they are connected : As soon as property became recognized as the thing that chiefly insures the satisfaction of desire, the "law of acquisi- tion" went into effect, and thenceforth the problem was how to acquire the most with the least effort — not how to produce the most. The "least effort" part of the formula lies at the foundation of the author's distinction between "industry and exploit." Exploit is comparatively easy. Industry becomes synonymous with drudgery. The love of activity, /. e., the actual pleasure in the exercise of the faculties, which is the essence of the "instinct of workmanship," could scarcely be eliminated, and "leisure" is by no means incompatible with activity. But excessive activity — the prolonged and laborious exertion required for the constant re-production of the objects of consumption — is essentially irksome and has always been avoided when possible. But these objects must be produced in order that their consumption may be enjoyed, and the only way to possess them without producing them is to make others produce them. Any power to do this is immediately exercised, and as things have been constituted in the history of man- kind, this has taken the form of creating a dependent industrial class and an independent leisure class. The simplest form of this was slavery, and, as the author shows, the first slaves were women ; after- ward captives were made slaves; and finally all were enslaved but the few having privilege and power. Extensive modification of this normal state, of course, took place with time.

Now, the most natural thing in the world is that these two sets of persons should form two great classes totally unlike in almost every

\