A survey of the relative positions occupied by the recipients of service and of property income, shows that the property owners hold practically all of the strategic points. They are supported by tradition; bulwarked by custom, and protected by most of the motive forces of society. The social mind and the social structure alike have been shaped so that they would function in terms of property income rights and privileges.
Those who receive service income have the advantage of numbers and the possibilities of organized action. They are convinced of the essential injustice of their position. Otherwise they are compelled to go weaponless into the conflict.
Economic forces are pushing forward the issue. They have placed on one side the majority of the population, who carry the burdens of economic society, and put forth the energy necessary to propel industry. On the other side, the economic forces have ranged a small group of persons in whose hands is concentrated the great bulk of the income-yielding wealth of the community. The forces of economic society are sharpening the contrast between service and property income, and adding daily to the irony of a status which compels workers to skimp and abstain while property owners may idle and luxuriate.
Wherever one group in a community secures large income return without participating in the work of creating those returns, while another group in the same community carries the burden of the work and at the same time receives a meager share of the product of its labor, there, sooner or later, a conflict will arise. The conflict may be peaceful, and long drawn out, like that between the English peasantry and the English landlords, or it may be dramatic, spectacular and bloody like that between the French peasantry and their landlords. The conflict will come, however, because if there is one deep-rooted conviction in the human breast, it is that each person has a right to what he earns. Crude, indeed,
