Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/59

Rh them, and to do the most extensive hauling for those who had the largest bulk of hauling for them to do. They were not authorized by their acts of incorporation to first demand certificates of good moral character, or affidavits that the would-be customer was not a combination of individuals or stockholders in a trust or a private corporation. And yet, superfluous as this statement is, it is actually out of such familiar truisms as these (it is difficult to treat the simpleness of the situation without tautology) that Mr. Hudson raises figment after figment and chimera after chimera to disturb and alarm the non-producing and manufacturing classes of this already imperiled community! And the purport of these figments and the portent of these chimeras is always that any use of capital in bulk is crime against this people and this republic; and that the incorporation for business purposes "stands in" with some railway company or all railway companies, because incorporations—and especially railway incorporations—hate the bread-winner and the wage-worker, and desire that he be crushed and swept from the face of the earth; in other words, are feudal, mediæval, and unpatriotic. That is the whole text and comment of Mr. Hudson's elocution. Even feudalism itself was not a curse. It was a proper and convenient institution for its day and date; considering the popular ignorance and helplessness, anything else would have been a less tolerable tyranny. It was the growth of circumstances, rather than—as Mr. Hudson thinks—the forcing of an arbitrary situation by the strong and aristocratic upon the plebeian and the weak: so, to begin with, granting Mr. Hudson's favored and capitalist class, and granting that they "force" any condition of things upon the non-capitalist class, the analogy of this state of things to the institution of feudalism is false and misleading. But feudalism was more than a situation. It was the only form in which the society of the unlettered and formative civilization could be held together at all—the only one which could, on the one hand, curb the despotism of thrones, while on the other conserving the safety and tranquillity of the people. It was the mother of parliamentary government and of civil liberty, to which—in the fullness of time—it yielded and disappeared.

To give a meaning to Mr. Hudson's vision of an analogy between modern industrial centralization and feudalism, let us assume, however, that he means (he does not say so) the mediæval trade-guilds. Now, these trade-guilds, perhaps, were an accompaniment of—certainly they were contemporary with—the institution of feudalism. Moreover, they were broken up and wiped away by the very institution which Mr. Hudson can not find words enough to stigmatize as the root of every modern