Such classes always will exist; no other social distinctions can endure. It is a harsh and unjust burden which is laid upon him, and it is only the more unjust because no one thinks of him when laying the burden so that it falls on him. Undoubtedly the man who possesses capital has a great advantage over the man who has no capital, in all the struggle for existence. Village communities, which excite the romantic admiration of some writers, were fit only for a most elementary and unorganized society. New ones must be invented to hold the power of wealth to that responsibility without which no power whatever is consistent with liberty. William Graham Sumner wrote an article in 1883 to directly address this dilemma, called, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other. The amateurs in social science always ask: What shall we do? Just so a sociologist who should attach moral applications and practical maxims to his investigations would entirely miss his proper business. They have been set free. If his sphere of action and interest impinges on that of any other man, there will have to be compromise and adjustment. There is a beautiful notion afloat in our literature and in the minds of our people that men are born to certain "natural rights." The fashion of the time is to run to government boards, commissions, and inspectors to set right everything which is wrong. Society can do without patricians, but it cannot do without patrician virtues. [William Graham Sumner (18401910) was a sociologist at Yale University, a historian of American banking, and great expositor of classical liberalism. Helpful. Furthermore, the unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of a new state. William Graham Sumner defended income inequality, as Rick Santorum recently has. On the other hand, we con-stantly read and hear discussions of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact. Either the price remains high, and they permanently learn to do without the commodity, or the price is lowered, and they buy again. It is a system of division of functions, which is being refined all the time by subdivision of trade and occupation, and by the differentiation of new trades. Of course, if a speculator breaks loose from science and history, and plans out an ideal society in which all the conditions are to be different, he is a lawgiver or prophet, and those may listen to him who have leisure. If it were not for the notion brought from England, that trade unions are, in some mysterious way, beneficial to the workmenwhich notion has now become an article of faithit is very doubtful whether American workmen would find that the unions were of any use, unless they were converted into organizations for accomplishing the purposes enumerated above. If, when he died, he left no competent successor, the business must break up, and pass into new organization in the hands of other men. Yet where is he? The penalty of ceasing an aggressive behavior toward the hardships of life on the part of mankind is that we go backward. How right he was, how incredibly prescient, to see this coming. The capital which, as we have seen, is the condition of all welfare on earth, the fortification of existence, and the means of growth, is an object of cupidity. If a strike succeeds, the question arises whether an advance of wages as great or greater would not have occurred within a limited period without a strike. The wealth which he wins would not be but for him. Correspondence, travel, newspapers, circulars, and telegrams bring to employers and capitalists the information which they need for the defense of their interests. Moreover, liberty is not a metaphysical or sentimental thing at all. what social classes owe to each other summary and analysis. If it is true in any sense that we all own the soil in common, the best use we can make of our undivided interests is to vest them all gratuitously (just as we now do) in any who will assume the function of directly treating the soil, while the rest of us take other shares in the social organization. Will the American Economy Survive in 2018? Now, the aid which helps a man to help himself is not in the least akin to the aid which is given in charity. No experience seems to damp the faith of our public in these instrumentalities. Civil service reform would be a greater gain to the laborers than innumerable factory acts and eight-hour laws. These persons are united by community of interest into a group, or class, or interest, and, when interests come to be adjusted, the interests of this group will undoubtedly be limited by those of other groups. If A has taken a piece of land, and is at work getting his loaf out of it, B cannot use the same land at the same time for the same purpose. This is the question William Graham Sumner poses and attempts to answer in What Do Social Classes Owe to Eachother. The Connecticut tobacco growers at once called for an import duty on tobacco which would keep up the price of their product. It is relegated to the sphere of private and personal relations, where it depends not at all on class types, but on personal acquaintance and personal estimates. Trade unions adopt various devices for raising wages, and those who give their time to philanthropy are interested in these devices, and wish them success. If those things were better understood public opinion about the ethics of marriage and parentage would undergo a most salutary change. The struggles of the race as a whole produce the possessions of the race as a whole. There never has been any man, from the primitive barbarian up to a Humboldt or a Darwin, who could do as he had a mind to. In our modern revolt against the medieval notions of hereditary honor and hereditary shame we have gone too far, for we have lost the appreciation of the true dependence of children on parents. Supply and demand now determine the distribution of population between the direct use of land and other pursuits; and if the total profits and chances of land-culture were reduced by taking all the "unearned increment" in taxes, there would simply be a redistribution of industry until the profits of land-culture, less taxes and without chances from increasing value, were equal to the profits of other pursuits under exemption from taxation. What shall be done with him is a question of expediency to be settled in view of the interests of societythat is, of the non-criminals. They compete with each other for food until they run up the rent of land, and they compete with each other for wages until they give the capitalist a great amount of productive energy for a given amount of capital. These ties endured as long as life lasted. It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of a new state, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new state grows up. For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? Sometimes they are discontented and envious. One great means of exceptional profit lies in the very fact that the employees have not exercised the same foresight, but have plodded along and waited for the slow and successive action of the industrial system through successive periods of production, while the employer has anticipated and synchronized several successive steps. Capital and labor are the two things which least admit of monopoly. Our orators and writers never speak of it, and do not seem often to know anything about it; but the real danger of democracy is that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the dutiesthat is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have. He may grumble sometimes to his wife, but he does not frequent the grocery, and he does not talk politics at the tavern. We can only divert it from the head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. It has been said, in answer to my argument in the last chapter about the Forgotten Women and thread, that the tax on thread is "only a little thing," and that it cannot hurt the women much, and also that, if the women do not want to pay two cents a spool tax, there is thread of an inferior quality, which they can buy cheaper. We cannot build a school, a hospital, a church, or employ a missionary society, without capital, any more than we could build a palace or a factory without capital. They have always been, as a class, chargeable with licentiousness and gambling. It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. We shall find that, in our efforts to eliminate the old vices of class government, we are impeded and defeated by new products of the worst class theory. He knows something of the laws of nature; he can avail himself of what is favorable, and avert what is unfavorable, in nature, to a certain extent; he has narrowed the sphere of accident, and in some respects reduced it to computations which lessen its importance; he can bring the productive forces of nature into service, and make them produce food, clothing, and shelter. In order, however, that they may be so employed successfully and correctly it is essential that the terms should be correctly defined, and that their popular use should conform to correct definitions. It has had to buy its experience. This tendency is in the public interest, for it is in the direction of more satisfactory responsibility. The middle class has been obliged to fight for its rights against the feudal class, and it has, during three or four centuries, gradually invented and established institutions to guarantee personal and property rights against the arbitrary will of kings and nobles. On the Reasons Why Man Is Not Altogether a Brute. Write a courtesy letter to your grandma (mother's mother). What is the other industry? A society based on contract, therefore, gives the utmost room and chance for individual development, and for all the self-reliance and dignity of a free man. 1 Review. If we go to find him, we shall find him hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies. The other sovereigns will not respect his independence if he becomes dependent, and they cannot respect his equality if he sues for favors. There is an almost invincible prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings-bank is stingy and mean. Contract, however, is rationaleven rationalistic. Who elected these legislators. This is a social duty. It was said that there would be a rebellion if the taxes were not taken off whiskey and tobacco, which taxes were paid into the public treasury. WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER. So it should be, and under such a state of things there is no reason to desire to limit the property which any man may acquire. This collection of essays is a good example of his approach to the subject. Whether the people who mean no harm, but are weak in the essential powers necessary to the performance of one's duties in life, or those who are malicious and vicious, do the more mischief, is a question not easy to answer. Just so in sociology. The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow men. The role of parent falls always to the Forgotten Man. It is he who must work and pay. A free man in a free democracy has no duty whatever toward other men of the same rank and standing, except respect, courtesy, and goodwill. When did he ever get the benefit of any of the numberless efforts in his behalf? Those fallacies run through all socialistic schemes and theories. It belongs to his character to save something. Those who are in have, therefore, made a monopoly, and constituted themselves a privileged class on a basis exactly analogous to that of the old privileged aristocracies. They are useful to spread information, to maintain esprit de corps, to elevate the public opinion of the class. Such is the actual interpretation in practice of natural rightsclaims which some people have by prerogative on other people. If political power be given to the masses who have not hitherto had it, nothing will stop them from abusing it but laws and institutions. When they had settled this question a priori to their satisfaction, they set to work to make their ideal society, and today we suffer the consequences. The man struck by the falling tree has, perhaps, been careless. When I have read certain of these discussions I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one's own way and earn one's own living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing. Hence, liberty for labor and security for earnings are the ends for which civil institutions exist, not means which may be employed for ulterior ends. The Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection/Duke University. A democracy, then, becomes immoral, if all have not equal political duties. For a man who can command another man's labor and self-denial for the support of his own existence is a privileged person of the highest species conceivable on earth. He goes further to present a completely contrary model of society, one that highlights the capacity for group cooperation. Those we will endure or combat as we can. It is assumed that he is provided for and out of the account. About him no more need be said. Report abuse. It is like war, for it is war. There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors. If an office is granted by favoritism or for any personal reason to A, it cannot be given to B. Think of public teachers who say that the farmer is ruined by the cost of transportation, when they mean that he cannot make any profits because his farm is too far from the market, and who denounce the railroad because it does not correct for the farmer, at the expense of its stockholders, the disadvantage which lies in the physical situation of the farm! His existence was almost entirely controlled by accident; he possessed no capital; he lived out of his product, and production had only the two elements of land and labor of appropriation. The boon, or gift, would be to get some land after somebody else had made it fit for use. If one of those who are in either of the latter classes is a spendthrift he loses his advantage. An elective judiciary is a device so much in the interest of plutocracy, that it must be regarded as a striking proof of the toughness of the judicial institution that it has resisted the corruption so much as it has. If the sewing women, teachers, servants, and washer women could once be collected over against the thread mill, then some inferences could be drawn which would be worth something. The term labor is used, thirdly, in a more restricted, very popular and current, but very ill-defined way, to designate a limited sub-group among those who live by contributing productive efforts to the work of society. Now, parental affection constitutes the personal motive which drives every man in his place to an aggressive and conquering policy toward the limiting conditions of human life. The popular rage is not without reason, but it is sadly misdirected and the real things which deserve attack are thriving all the time. The chief need seems to be more power of voluntary combination and cooperation among those who are aggrieved. A little observation shows that there is no such thing in this world as doing as one has a mind to. The human race has had to pay with its blood at every step. But merchants, bankers, professional men, and all whose labor is, to an important degree, mental as well as manual, are excluded from this third use of the term labor. The same piece of capital cannot be used in two ways. SHOW MORE . I shall have something to say in another chapter about the necessary checks and guarantees, in a political point of view, which must be established. We may philosophize as coolly and correctly as we choose about our duties and about the laws of right living; no one of us lives up to what he knows. 17 untaxed per mile) for any mileage over 5500 each week! As we would expect, income is a powerful determinant of the social class into which people place themselves, as is, to a lesser degree, education. The old constitutional guarantees were all aimed against king and nobles. He is a "poor" man in the popular sense of the word, but not in a correct sense. Will anyone deny that individual black men may seem worse off? When we see a drunkard in the gutter we pity him. How has the change been brought about? Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this typethat A and B decide what C shall do for D. It will be interesting to inquire, at a later period of our discussion, who C is, and what the effect is upon him of all these arrangements. In its widest extension it comes to mean that if any man finds himself uncomfortable in this world, it must be somebody else's fault, and that somebody is bound to come and make him comfortable. The problem of civil liberty is constantly renewed. No production is possible without the cooperation of all three. Is it mean to be a capitalist? They are more likely to give away capital recklessly than to withhold it stingily when any alleged case of misfortune is before them. Certainly in no way save by pushing down anyone else who is forced to contribute to his advancement. Unquestionably capital accumulates with a rapidity which follows in some high series the security, good government, peaceful order of the state in which it is employed; and if the state steps in, on the death of the holder, to claim a share of the inheritance, such a claim may be fully justified. The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings toward "the poor," "the weak," "the laborers," and others of whom they make pets. That we have lost some grace and elegance is undeniable. Think of two men who want to lift a weight, one of whom has a lever, and the other must apply his hands directly; think of two men tilling the soil, one of whom uses his hands or a stick, while the other has a horse and a plough; think of two men in conflict with a wild animal, one of whom has only a stick or a stone, while the other has a repeating rifle; think of two men who are sick, one of whom can travel, command medical skill, get space, light, air, and water, while the other lacks all these things.