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offices, free worship, and exemption from church tithes. When these are granted, when the religious hold weakens, when the majority turns to material pleasures, subordinate classes demand exemption from sumptuary laws of all kinds, and the right to enjoy themselves in their own way and to spend their money as they choose. Beliefs and enjoyments take precedence of all other desires in the hearts of people. They are concerned mainly with the use of property. But accompanying these pri- mary political differences, and later intensified with the growing density of population, with the increase in technical improve- ments, with new kinds of industry, with extremes in wealth, political differences arise concerning the distribution of property. These differences arose, indeed, in connection with beliefs and enjoyments. The seculiarization of monasteries and guilds was a redistribution of property through superior coercion animated by new ethical motives. But in modern times the property question becomes more distinct. The tariff question turns on the distribution of property between manufacturers and farmers ; the currency question, between creditors and debtors ; corpora- tion questions, between capitalists and "the public;" factory laws, between the employers and laborers ; and so on. All of these questions affect the incomes and the coercive power of the several classes in society.
The foregoing are the main political problems which enter into sovereignty. These must be decided by the state before the people can attend to the business or technical problems. And upon their decision the latter problems must be solved as best they can. Here we find the criterion of the successful solution of the ethical or political problem. The political prob- lem deals with the destination of the benefits of social services. The only immediate criterion of its successful solution is the satisfaction it gives to the desires and ethical opinions of those who have the power. But there is an ultimate, as distinguished from the immediate, criterion. This is the survival or extinction of the society in the struggle for existence with other societies. If the state, in redistributing coercion among its members, has done so, not merely in the narrow spirit of class dominion, but
