1 92 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
of the humbler boy was to endure corporal punishment in place of the privileged scion. The latter was held to be too good to suffer bodily for his own misdeeds, but was capable of commit- ting rascalities enough to keep the skin of the human foil fre- quently smarting. When we think of that domestic institution, even across the intervening time and space, we are conscious of indignation, not chiefly on account of the physical affliction, but because of the outrage against the personal integrity of the base-born boy. He was denied the individuality which distin- guishes man from matter. He was forbidden to be a self, responsible for his deed and accountable for his fault. He was stunted in moral stature. His sense of justice was stultified. His possession of sentiment like that of other human beings was despised. He was denied the right to develop as a man, and was turned into a wolf or a sheep. The judgment of history upon American slavery will doubtless emphasize this element, while it recognizes that the slaves as a rule had ampler security of their standard of physical welfare than many free populations enjoy. Exclusion from the franchise of personal integrity con- demned the system which so liberally guaranteed bodily integ- rity. The radical evil of our present wage system is not that it permits inequality of distribution, but that the inequality is so largely an index of an arbitrary personal inequality that gives artificial weight to the will of some persons and artificially counts out. the will of others. Human nature unsubdued by social veto instinctively asserts for each individual a distinct inviolate dignity. As Fichte expresses it: "The marrow of the idea of justice is that each man has an equal claim with every other man upon the full development of himself." 1
Closely related with this instinct of personal integrity, and intimately involved in its realization, is a social claim which may be called, in the absence of a better term, the craving for reciprocal valuation. A variation of this impulse manifests itself in manifold demands for functional valuation, all impelled at one point by the distinctively social desire, but all sooner or later resolving themselves, with all the other human impulses, 19.
