Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/873

 REVIEWS 853

All classes are enjoying wealth and comforts impossible to our ancestors, but a sense of justice requires that special favors should not unduly enrich a few. "A man can't die on skim milk, but you don't like to see a few at a side table take all the cream."

The fear of private control of government haunts the thought even of those who a few years ago most bitterly denounced state aid and extension of municipal functions. "There is a growing conviction that private ownership may gather to itself such strength and mastery as to control politics and defeat the very beginnings of democratic government."

The trade-union movement is a part of the general life of democ- racy. It "rests on the assumption that the production and distribution of wealth, as now managed, ought to be and can be so far changed as to give the laborer more power in deciding the terms under which he works."

In a study of the effects of machinery and the attitude of trade unions toward labor-saving devices, the author shows how antiquated is American law in relation to modern conditions. The doctrine of employers' liability, which was suited to the small shop, is absurd when applied to a complicated mill. "The average business now insures against accidents in some private company, whose skilled lawyer knows every device to beat the injured workman in the courts." It is almost impossible to get a hearing in America for the principle which under- lies the German insurance laws and for an imperial experience with those beneficent laws. " Here and there private corporations act honor- ably toward their injured workmen, but the general mass of crippled life in our country is indemnified, if at all, with a meanness, with a fickleness and uncertainty, that is a reproach to our civilization." No nation has realized such immense benefits from machinery, and no people has so loaded the laboring class with the disadvantages which come with improvements.

The "master passion" of democracy is not for absolute equality and monotony of existence, but for equality of opportunity for man, woman, and child.

If trade unions are defeated, socialism is at the door. Thus said the conservative Professor Clark in his essay on trusts, and our more radical author agrees with him. The hope of wage-workers, when they are not sunk in apathy, is now in the trade unions ; but even in these there is a strong and aggressive socialistic membership who actually wish the unions to fail. Whenever a strike is defeated capitalist man-