Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/460

 will pay for most heavily; and if certain men, or certain functions, receive great rewards it is because they have taken, or have involved, exceptional risks or pains. Men as now constituted will not tolerate a compulsory equality. Until an automatically-changed environment automatically changes human character, legislation enacting artificial changes will be as futile as astrology.

Spencer was almost made sick by the thought of a world ruled by the wage-earning class. He was not enamored of trade-union leaders so far as he could know them through the refractory medium of the London Times. He pointed out that strikes are useless unless most strikes fail; for if all workers should, at various times, strike and win, prices would presumably rise in accord with the raised wages, and the situation would be as before. "We shall presently see the injustices once inflicted by the employing classes paralleled by the injustices inflicted by the employed classes."

Nevertheless his conclusions were not blindly conservative. He realized the chaos and brutality of the social system that surrounded him, and he looked about with evident eagerness to find a substitute. In the end he gave his sympathies to the movement; he saw in this the culmination of that passage from status to contract in which Sir Henry Maine had found the essence of economic history. "The regulation of labor becomes less coercive as society assumes a higher type. Here we reach a form in which the coerciveness has diminished to the smallest degree consistent with combined action. Each member is his own master in respect of the work he does; and is subject only to such rules, established by majority of the members, as are needful for maintaining order. The transition from the compulsory cooperation of militancy to the voluntary coöperation of industrialism is completed." He