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238 organization? Again, in the discussion about trusts it is asserted that trusts adopt an arbitrary capitalization and then fix the prices of their products at such rates as to pay dividends on the paper capital. On the other hand, it is asserted that there are laws of the market which are imperative in their action and which make it utterly impossible for anybody to do that. In fact, the whole discussion revolves around this issue, without ever bringing it out as a definite, independent subject of debate. One or the other view is assumed implicitly, and the discussion moves over secondary and derived applications, while any chance of clearing the matter up is diminished by the odium which is imported into the discussion.

Indeed, there is another and still more fundamental difficulty than that last noticed. These questions all finally reach down to the notion which we entertain of the social organization and the facts as to what human society is. All schools of opinion talk about "nature," or what is "natural," and all of them ridicule each other's pretensions to know or to use the real natural order. It is here, in fact, that the great difficulty lies for any deliberative or theoretical solution of social questions. Our age has inherited the ruins of a half-dozen old philosophies and has invented a number of new ones. Each deduces an explanation of the social order from its own grand premises and an independent social science with its own guarantees does not exist. This does not stop the discussion, it only makes it all the more lively; but when one of us states his views, you can see that he is only rehearsing the platform of his school; and one who is well up in the doctrines of the schools can save time if each disputant will only say: I am a Comtist; I am a Darwinian; I am an evangelical Christian; I am an