364 THE AMERICAN' JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
needs, but take them on credit from others, hierarchical sup- pression of religion in the laity is possible ; but so soon as the religious interest begins to become conscious and reflective in the laity, then the imposition of priestly authority becomes such a violation of equality that the prevailing order is presently over- thrown.
The same formula expresses what takes place in the realm of the sociability-desires when the governing class fails to perceive that political consciousness has dawned in the governed classes, and that the desire of self-determination has emerged in opposi- tion to the desire of the rulers to be masters. When the policy, if not the spoken words, of Louis XIV. said, "L'tiat, c'est mot," the social or political existence of Frenchmen outside the administration was by implication denied. The peasant in the Vendee and the sans-culotte in Paris had not the knowl- edge of statecraft that the king possessed, but he was beginning to feel himself a political person. A century later he thought he was a political person in the same class with the king, and perhaps he was. At all events, the dogma of his political non- entity was the spark in the explosive sense of equality. The reaction shattered the artificial order which the dogma had made precarious for generations. Men actually have social interests. When these interests come to consciousness in politi- cal desires, they are real forces in the world as much as the affinities of chemical elements. They are not to be read out of the ranks of recognized forces without consequences as fatal to order as those which occur in the laboratory when the properties of chemical elements are ignored.
Still again, in the realm of the wealth interests, each man is a potential economist. Each man has not only wealth-interests and-wealth-desires, but economic ideas. When class-conscious- ness becomes definite, as in modern groups of wage-earners, the ideas of the group may be crude and unwise, but they exist ; they are the ideas of persons desiring to count as persons, and actually counting as persons, in the social reaction, just as surely as other persons count whose ideas are more mature. Social order involves accommodation of all other factors to this factor
