Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/525

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 505

gathering are likewise forms of production. This is true and they are also forms of consumption. It has also been said that all production is only a combination, that is to say, a displace- ment of elements. This is likewise true, but in gathering, hunt- ing, and fishing consumption and production are still involved in the pre-eminently simple form of a displacement, of a transpor- tation, while in production, properly speaking, there is a new combination of the raw materials which serve to form a new product.

While our logical and dogmatic classification is impregnable when we consider economic phenomena in the abstract, it seems even more valid from the historical and natural point of view, when we consider them in their social forms, in their organiza- tion. Thus all the sociologists, including the socialists, point out that the circulatory phenomena of societies, represented by roads, canals, railways, postal systems, telegraphs, telephones, money, credit, banks, are much more advanced in organization and in socialization than the phenomena of production or even of consumption. There is even one universal organ the international Postal Union. There are commercial museums. There is a universal code of marine signals, and the same thing is true of music and science. The unity existing in the majority of the treaties of commerce, in the most-favored-nation clause, has the same meaning as international expositions. There is a bibliography planned according to a common method, and even universities with international scope. In addition to all the concordant observations which I have presented elsewhere upon the relative advancement of the circulatory forms, as compared with those of consumption, and especially of production, particu- larly in my Essais sur la monnaie, la credit, et les banques, I have found confirmation in this not less interesting fact emphasized by M. Polleans in his creditable book on L'accaparement, viz., that

not only economic facts, but the words for them, have had their evolution. One could not speak of monopoly of production so long as concentration of the means of production did not exist. Speculative or commercial monopoly, which for a long time was the only kind in sight, is entirely eclipsed at