Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/236

224 developed in a sort of alternating current between these main factors of the process. Consequently, the inevitable problem immediately upon us is that of reconsidering and readjusting our whole scheme of distribution with its underlying concepts of justice.

This being the case, every strike, or other interruption of the process, becomes an implicit challenge to the thinkers to find out what meaning the interruption has with reference to the healthiness or unhealthiness of the process itself. The immediate question is: Has either party failed to meet the requirements of public law and of private contracts? This immediate question, however, is relatively trivial. The more important question is: Do the law and the social situation make it morally certain that one party can and will take an unjust advantage of the other part in deciding how the burdens and the products of industry shall be divided? Especially, has the legal creation of artificial persons so changed the balance of power between men that those who are simply left to their individual resources as natural persons are in an unjust degree at the mercy of those who are clothed with the power of artificial persons?

These questions open the whole problem of the actual process which is going forward in our own day. They require such knowledge of the demographic, economic, legal, and moral factors of our present activities that we can form the same kind of a judgment about a given labor difficulty which a trainman forms about a cracked wheel or a hot bearing.

The most characteristic feature in our American social process today is the instinctive effort of all to defend themselves against the superior power which some have gained by combination, and then to find a way of getting for themselves the advantages of combination. The most important discovery which the nineteenth century made was the secret of multiplying individual power, and of intrenching individual security by combination of interests. The present stage of the social process is a typical reaction against a monopoly of that discovery by the few, and a typical effort to get the benefits of the discovery for the many.

As has been urged above, an adequate conception of human