Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/375

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 361

calls for exhibit of the whole social unbalance, whether in judg- ment of a past or of present society. The world is not a gift enterprise ; it is not constructed on the free-lunch plan. The world owes nobody a living. It is true that no one can earn the kind of living that all civilized men want today, because the best of us have to be pensioners on the past to an extent which no one can compensate. The most skillful "architect of his own fortune" in spite of himself comes into the greater part of his fortune by inheritance from other men. On the other hand, it is true that, as against the other persons of his own generation, nobody has any claim that sociology can recog- nize to good things except in proportion to the utility which his personal service in the world bears to the service per- formed by all other men. Wherever this proportion is dis- arranged there is in some way a disturbance of the vicarious relations.

Accordingly we may say of the present as of the past : It may be formulated in terms of vicariousness. The present social order is normal and permanent to the degree in which it secures natural vicarious interaction between all the associated persons. Present social order is provisional and insecure in proportion to its toleration of partial reciprocity or repudiation of the dues of vicariousness on the part of any of the associated persons. Thus the labor problem, the currency problem, the tariff problem, the civil-service problem, the expansion problem, the liquor prob- lem, the social-evil problem, the revenue problem, the trust prob- lem, and so on through the whole list each may be analyzed in terms of partially realized vicariousness. In so far as reciprocity is approximately normal we have corresponding social equilib- rium. In so far as a false balance of reciprocity is involved in social programs there is unstable equilibrium. While this is merely, in the first instance, another of our technical abstractions, it is at the same time a category without the aid of which there can be no adequate penetration into the essential social situation in its most practical aspects.

XIII. Persistence of the individuals. The fact to which we now refer may be symbolized by what goes on in a mixture of