824 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
public or private hands, it cannot neglect its basis. Now, organi- zation is essential to the right to employment, and socialists, by disdaining administrative problems, fail to comprehend the very nature of the state which they seek to enlarge.
Without considering further the possible details of state con- trol of industry, we can only observe the principle. The growth of monopoly and centralization increases the coercive power of the private owners of industry by strengthening the privative sanctions. All the opportunities for investment and labor being under the control of a single authority, the material penalties inflicted on those who do not obey this authority are unavoid- able. But the grounds for private coercive authority having ceased through the cessation of struggle, the state as the coer- cive institution of society tends to absorb this side of the indus- trial institution. It constitutes itself the coercive framework of industry within which the persuasive motives operate. This framework consists in the statutes and codes of laws govern- ing property and corporations, the factory laws, the judicial decisions, the administrative methods which determine the rela- tions of producers to each other. The state becomes the frame- work of industry, just as it becomes the framework of the family and the church. The laws governing property and labor consti- tute the bulk of its functions, and the legislatures, courts, and executives have been created expressly for, and are busied mainly with, the regulation of this important institution. And here, as with the other two original institutions, we see how the organic nature of the state has grown. It has been differen- tiated out from the primitive, homogeneous blending of institu- tions, not by being separated off from society and set out as a kind of envoy extraordinary, whose business it is to treat and arbitrate with foreign states and between private proprietors, but the very differentiation has been at the same time a deepening of the hold of the state and its seizure upon the hidden recesses of society previously autonomous. The state bears the relation to other institutions of structure to function, of organization to life, of machinery to force, of coercion to persuasion.
It is in this very way that the state liberates the industrial
