Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/385

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 371

the assumption is wide of the reality, the customs and the laws presently prove to be factors of disorder. These general propo- sitions are not affected in principle by the fact that changes of circumstances rather than original misconception of justice may produce incongruity between regulative customs and laws, and the interests which they essay to control. Nobody can foresee all the shiftings of advantage and disadvantage which a given legal rule may permit or promote. Its purpose may be just ; its immediate effects may be just ; its remote effects may be unjust.

For instance, the present Illinois law of workmen's liens is prima facie calculated to protect the weak against the strong. "The law provides that all debts or claims for materials furnished or labor expended shall constitute a lien on the ownership of the land, a lien on the fee. If a workman has a claim for services, or a steel manufacturer a claim for material provided, he has a right upon the fee itself and not merely as against the contractor who employed him or who used his steel." 1 The effect of the law is said to have been, among other things, to throw a large part of the building business in Chicago into the hands of irre- sponsible contractors, and this fact doubtless has had much to do with the recent disorders in the building trades, involving many sorts of injustice to many classes of people.

In contemplating a society writhing in disorder to break the fetters of the constraining order, one of the lenses through which we must look is furnished, then, by the idea of justice. If we attempt to understand the disorder as a theory and a feeling in men's minds, then our task is to make out what objective facts fail to correspond with the standards of justice which the men in question entertain. If we attempt to understand the disorder as a somewhat unconscious outburst of the social forces, as a natural but not necessarily as a deliberate phenomenon, then our task is to find objective disarrangements of justice. And in this case of course our own standard of justice has to serve as a temporary criterion. In all cases the incident that we term justice is a tendency, a gravitation, an outcropping of persistent moral qual- ity, the full force of which has yet to appear.

1 Vid. HENRY IVES COBB, in Chicago Times-Herald, November 20, 1899.