Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/535

Rh and time again in the past; but as colonies and inventions are immediately monopolized nowadays we need not expect much further obstruction from these factors. It is high time, therefore, that we faced the problem. Instead of trying to stimulate the competitive system, which is really moribund, we should accept the situation as it is and ask what the new coercive system signifies, how long it will last and what system will probably succeed it.

It is a fact beyond dispute, I believe—though I confess with the short space at my disposal I have not been able to present more than passing proof of the fact—that to the extent that the sources of the surplus are monopolized, to just such extent can the monopolizers coerce those shut out of such monopoly. During the middle ages the coercive system was established, as we have seen, through the monopolization of the sources of the agricultural surplus by powerful feudal lords. Being dependent upon the feudal lords for their land, the peasants were deprived of free access to the agricultural surplus source, and could consequently be coerced. In our day the coercive system is being reestablished through the monopolization of the sources of the industrial surplus by the great capitalists. Becoming dependent upon these capitalists for their jobs, wage-earners and salaried men generally are being deprived of free access to the industrial surplus sources and to this extent they too are being coerced. As throughout the middle ages a few free peasant communities remained, so in modern times independent producers persist in some industries. Still as most of the land was feudalized in medieval times, the free peasants existed more by sufferance than by right; and as the main lines of industry are nowadays controlled by great capitalists, the existing independence of the small producer is nominal rather than real.

But freemen have never submitted to coercion with good grace if there was any way to throw off the yoke. For this reason coercion has never proved itself in the end a productive system of association; it runs faster, so to speak, toward the law of diminishing returns than any other system thus far devised. These facts are fundamental and serve to suggest the probable outcome of the existing situation. Let us therefore regard present conditions from this point of view.

As soon as the wage-earners recognized that despite their saving they could not become capitalists, they began at once to present an organized front to coercion. Up to this time the forces of labor had been associated for the purpose of increasing the profits of capital. Henceforth the laborers themselves began to organize their own forces with a view to raising the wages of labor. Trade unionism was the result. It was then that the shield was reversed and the other side exposed to view. It had become evident enough in the past that labor could not develop the industrial surplus source without capital; recently it has