582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and this connection between the assembling of many people and the 

 exchancfincr of commodities, which first shows itself at intervals, be- 

 comes a permanent connection where many people become permanently 

 assembled where a town grows up in the neighborhood of a temple, 

 or around a stronghold, or in a place where local circumstances favor 

 some manufacture. 



Industrial development further aids popular emancipation by gen- 

 erating an order of men whose power, derived from their wealth, com- 

 petes with, and begins in some cases to exceed, the power of those 

 who previously were alone w^ealthy the men of rank. While this 

 initiates a conflict which diminishes the influence previously exercised 

 by patriarchal or feudal heads only, it also initiates a milder form of 

 subordination. Rising, as the rich trader habitually does in early 

 times, from the non-privileged class, the relation between him and 

 those under him is one from w^hich there is excluded the idea of per- 

 sonal subjection. In proportion as the industrial activities become 

 predominant, they make familiar a connection between employer and 

 employed, which differs from the relation between master and slave, 

 or lord and vassal, by not including allegiance. Under earlier condi- 

 tions there does not exist the idea of detached individual life life 

 which neither receives protection from a clan-head or feudal sujDcrior 

 nor is carried on in obedience to him. But in town-populations, made 

 up largely of refugees, who either become small traders or are em- 

 ployed by large ones, the experience of a relatively independent life 

 becomes common, and the conception of it distinct. 



And the form of cooperation distinctive of the industrial state 

 which thus arises fosters the feelings and thoughts appropriate to pop- 

 ular power. In daily usage there is a balancing of claims ; and the 

 conception of equity is, generation after generation, made clearer. 

 The relations between employer and employed, and between buyer 

 and seller, can be maintained only on condition that the obligations 

 on either side are fulfilled. AVhere they are not fulfilled the relation 

 lapses, and leaves outstanding those relations in which they are ful- 

 filled. Commercial success and growth have thus, as their inevitable 

 concomitants, the maintenance of the respective claims of those con- 

 cerned, and a strengthening consciousness of them. 



In brief, then, dissolving in various w^ays the old relation of status, 

 and substituting the new relation of contract (to use Sir Henry Maine's 

 antithesis), progressing industrialism brings together masses of peo- 

 ple who by their circumstances are enabled, and by their discipline 

 prompted, to modify the political organization which militancy has 

 bequeathed. 



It is common to speak of free forms of government as having been 

 initiated by happy accidents. Antagonisms between different powers 

 in the state, or different factions, have caused one or other to bid for 



