Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/876

 862 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Though it is easy to insure against accidents and sickness, it is almost impossible to insure against business stagnation ; or to assure to each one the necessary work, and to insure each one from falling into poverty at some moment. Is the problem insoluble ?

Free work has brought great good to civilization, and to no small degree bene- fited the workingman as compared with one hundred years ago ; but one of the first consequences of it, free competition, has brought on a struggle, more and more intense, in which the strong have crushed the weak.

To prevent this crushing, some propose a scheme of collectivism, the real logic of socialism, under which all the powers, the property, the soil, the means of produc- tion, the distribution or division of goods, are concentrated in the state. The objec- tions to such a system are so numerous and well known that it is useless to repeat them to economists.

But M. Thury, professor at the University of Geneva, approaches the problem a little differently. He is an individualist, and so is opposed to the socialist regime. In a recent publication on The Social Question in its Principle, Looked at from a Religious Point of View, he has formulated his principles that would form a basis for an essay on the organization of social work. Some of his leading ideas are expressed under such themes as, : the right to the means of work derived from the obligation to work ; the soil, the source of the necessaries of life ; individual or collective owner- ship of the soil ; labor organizations and the use of machines ; and the division of the products of labor. He summed up his propositions in these terms : " Let competition be free as to the comforts ; reserve one realm, that of the necessaries of life, and from that exclude speculation." This is not an entirely new regime, but is a kind of compromise between the old and the new conditions of society. FREDERIC NECKER, " L'Organisation du Travail," in an exposition of M. Thury's labor theory, in Reforme sociale, December 16, 1900. T. J. R.

The Social Future of England. Just as the democracies of the ancient world revealed the tendency to decline into tyrannies or oligarchies, so it is quite conceivable that the modern industrial movement which determines our political evolution may draw society into the clutches of an oligarchy. The truth is that up to the present the modern industrial movement has led and is leading up to a new aristocracy of wealth rather than toward a democracy. Industrialism of itself will not bring democracy ; only a democratic ideal formed in the mind and governing action will accomplish that result. Now, my contention is that for all practical purposes no such democratic ideal animates the mass of English people.

Even though modern industrialism led of itself inevitably to democracy, there is the vital factor to be considered that the serious decline of England as a great indus- trial center has begun. If the future of England is not predominantly industrial, if the great staple trades are to pass from her grasp to the United States and the yellow races, what is England's future likely to be, and what will be the political effects resulting from her future economic condition ?

Two possible solutions of this interesting problem present themselves, but in very different degrees of probability. If the English were a democratic people, the same solution would present itself which has been seized on by so many of the continental peoples a vast peasant ownership, avoiding the pitfall of extreme morcellement, which would politically express itself in such democratic feeling and institutions as Switzerland, or perhaps Denmark, shows. But the economic movement in England is certainly not in that direction, but is absolutely toward the towns. The other alternative is that England is destined to be the pleasure-ground of the English- speaking people, and especially of the wealthy. The mass of English people, on this hypothesis, will more and more tend to be ministers in some way of this new rich class of English-speaking peoples who will repair, for purposes of health or culture, to their ancestral seats. For the less wealthy England will become a historical, museum, or possibly an academic center.

But the important factor to be noticed in the situation is the already vast increase of the servant classes and the still more rapid growth of this class as England abandons industrialism to act as entertainer of the English-speaking world. This kind of com- munity could not possibly be democratic. There is no class less open to democratic ideas than a contented servant class. Compared with them, their titled and wealthy