Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/266

 The fashion has always been in the past for those who possessed the essential powers to take control of the state and realize their monopoly in that way. If plutocracy should now prevail it would be simply a repetition of that experience. The only device which has ever given promise of wider and more humane organization of the state is constitutional liberty, which compels, by the intervention of institutions created to serve this purpose, the ruling class, whoever they were, to respect the recognized and defined rights of all the rest.

Now, democracy having sapped and dissolved all the inherited forms of social organization and reduced the social body to atoms, it is most interesting to observe the inevitable recurrence of all the old tendencies, in new forms fitted to the times. Some of us thought that liberty was won forever, and that the race was nevermore to be disturbed by its old problems, but it is already apparent that, when a society is resolved into its constituent atoms, the question under what forces, and upon what nuclei, it will crystallize into new forms, has acquired an importance never known before.

Just now public attention is all absorbed by the new name "trust" applied to one of these phenomena. I can see nothing new in a trust as compared with the rings, pools, etc., with which we have been familiar during this generation, except the guarantee which the trust secures to all the members of the same that no one inside of it shall play traitor to the rest. The greatest difficulty with modern combinations has been that there have been no sanctions by which the members could be bound, and that the profits of the insider who turned against his comrades have always been an irresistible temptation. In the mediæval guilds, which were "trusts" of the most solid construction, the sanctions were of the sternest kind — religious, political, and social — and yet they never