Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/600

582 and this connection between the assembling of many people and the exchanging of commodities, which first shows itself at intervals, becomes a permanent connection where many people become permanently assembled—where a town grows up in the neighborhood of a temple, or around a stronghold, or in a place where local circumstances favor some manufacture.

Industrial development further aids popular emancipation by generating an order of men whose power, derived from their wealth, competes with, and begins in some cases to exceed, the power of those who previously were alone wealthy—the men of rank. While this initiates a conflict which diminishes the influence previously exercised by patriarchal or feudal heads only, it also initiates a milder form of subordination. Rising, as the rich trader habitually does in early times, from the non-privileged class, the relation between him and those under him is one from which there is excluded the idea of personal subjection. In proportion as the industrial activities become predominant, they make familiar a connection between employer and employed, which differs from the relation between master and slave, or lord and vassal, by not including allegiance. Under earlier conditions there does not exist the idea of detached individual life—life which neither receives protection from a clan-head or feudal superior nor is carried on in obedience to him. But in town-populations, made up largely of refugees, who either become small traders or are employed by large ones, the experience of a relatively independent life becomes common, and the conception of it distinct.

And the form of coöperation distinctive of the industrial state which thus arises fosters the feelings and thoughts appropriate to popular power. In daily usage there is a balancing of claims; and the conception of equity is, generation after generation, made clearer. The relations between employer and employed, and between buyer and seller, can be maintained only on condition that the obligations on either side are fulfilled. Where they are not fulfilled the relation lapses, and leaves outstanding those relations in which they are fulfilled. Commercial success and growth have thus, as their inevitable concomitants, the maintenance of the respective claims of those concerned, and a strengthening consciousness of them.

In brief, then, dissolving in various ways the old relation of status, and substituting the new relation of contract (to use Sir Henry Maine's antithesis), progressing industrialism brings together masses of people who by their circumstances are enabled, and by their discipline prompted, to modify the political organization which militancy has bequeathed.

It is common to speak of free forms of government as having been initiated by happy accidents. Antagonisms between different powers in the state, or different factions, have caused one or other to bid for