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 86 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

industry and enterprise that those who are on the higher level are being crowded in competition by those on the lower. There may be also a certain class of industries, like the post-office, streets and roads, railways, sewers, water supply, in which the state goes still farther in its sovereign function of redistributing property among the people, and, by means of public monopoly of owner- ship and operation at cost or free of charges, attempts to place the poorer classes and sections upon an equal basis with wealth- ier classes and sections in the use of these services. Such indus- tries, too, operating under special franchises from councils and legislatures, are a peculiarly fertile source of corruption, and, in defense of its own autonomy, the state may be compelled to monopolize them in its own hands, even at the loss of the inven- tiveness and enterprise which private operation would introduce. Here the state is compelled to go beyond its duty as the coercive institution of society, wherein it acts only as the framework of the institutions, and to take up also the technical and business problems of industry. Ordinarily, however, except for these outside interests, the state's control of manufacturing monopolies would extend only to the provisions for partnership rights on behalf of investors, minority stockholders, and employes. This is the extent of its control in the other institutions, and is in harmony with its nature as the coercive institution constituting the framework within which private persuasion operates upon the persuasive motives.

CHAPTER XV.

SUMMARY.

I have designated these papers "A Sociological View of Sovereignty." It remains to justify this title and further to distinguish the sociological from other views. These are, as already stated, the philosophical, the legal, the political. Philo- sophical views turn upon the ideal, or ultimate purpose, of the state, as the expression of universal reason or of the develop- ment of human character. They tend to personify the state, and to abstract the idea from the actual historical institution. The sociological view is concerned not so much with the ultimate