246 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
being a military caste. The Bible charted the Unseen for them and so fortified them against priestcraft. Free schools limited the ascendency of the learned clan. Free land enabled them to employ themselves, and they did not learn to look up to the rich as the fountain of their earthly blessings. The direct manage- ment of their own affairs through the town meeting saved them from officialdom. Even the tlite were not indispensable, for the problems of their simple farmers' society were to ours what short division is to quadratic equations.
The consequences have been just what one might expect. In the absence of prestige and reverence, social control, the con- trol of the many over the one, has been pared down so far as to permit, too often, the aggression of the one upon the many. The reaction of the led upon the leaders has been more marked here than in the Old World. The democratic spirit that accom- panies a diffusion of social power has set on all our institutions the stamp of liberty and self-government. That these charac- teristics do not flow from some peculiar merit of our own is shown by the fact that when, as in Australia, like conditions recur the results are much the same as here.
It will be interesting to mark how the powerful democratic tradition that has grown up in this country meets the adverse conditions of the century we are just entering on. For there are no noteworthy present developments in American society that make for a still greater diffusion of social power; while there are several that tend to center it in certain classes. As we cease to be so much a farming people, and as in almost every branch of industry the independent producer gives way to some Titanic organization, the sense of dependence on the business magnate, the employer, and the capitalist is sure to favor the growth of patronal power. The moneyed man, as he comes more and more to predominate in matters eco- nomic, can hardly fail to gain in social, and consequently in political, weight.
Again, in order to protect ourselves against the lawless- ness, the insolence, and the rapacity of overgrown private interests, we shall have to develop the state especially on its
