Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/382

 368 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tive organ is liable to get "out of touch " with the membership. Aloof in sympathies and appreciations, a board of sages easily misapprehends the desires of its people, misconceives what will really benefit them. Thus the committee of a book club buys books the subscribers do not care to read. The trustees of a church inflict on the members a preacher they do not care to hear. A park board mulcts taxpayers for a city park so remote that few of them can visit it on week days. Or the burden may be underestimated, seeing that only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. The physicians on board of a health impose fussy sanitary regulations which are an intolerable annoyance to the masses. Labor leaders order a strike the miseries of which they do not fully realize. Directors build up a reserve with earnings that the stockholders had counted on receiving as dividends. Well-intentioned rulers exercise the right of quartering troops, of impressment, of search, or of taxation, with little idea of the galling burdens they impose.

Most serious of all, power is liable to be diverted to the private benefit of the power-holders. Always and everywhere the passive category of citizens sheds more than its share of blood, pays more than its share of taxes. Always and every- where public moneys are spent chiefly for the few, when the few rule. Power without responsibility is demoralizing. With every grant of power should go strict accountability for its use. If the common run are not competent to judge projects, they are at least competent to judge results. The pudding is proved in the eating. By this touchstone even blockheads can tell sages from quacks and knaves. Grant the wise few power to act for all, but couple therewith the obligation to surrender that power if the many find the consequences not to their liking. Life-tenure, co-optation, hereditary transmission, secrecy, censorship, terror- ism all these devices that enable a grant of power to be usurped divide associates into shearers and shorn, and so destroy the unity of the group.

The intellectual superiority of the corporation being estab- lished, turn we now to its moral characteristics. Does the delegation of power exalt justice as much as it exalts wisdom ?