96 MICHAEL A. LANE 



There is a smack of the Spanish inquisition about the fact 

 that a great university will close its libraries to a book of 

 world wide repute simply because the book is denunciatory 

 of certain great companies of capitalists called trusts. Why 

 should any university bar out of its library a work like the 

 late Mr. Lloyd's Wealth versus Commonwealth, when this 

 very work is indispensable to the scholar who would compile 

 a history of the trust movement in America? 



The political economist in America suffers from this 

 sort of lordship which, while it lasts, will have a deterrent 

 effect upon the rapid progress of original work in economic 

 science here at home. 



American sociologists, however, have no general com- 

 plaint to make in this respect; chiefly for the reason that 

 much, perhaps all, of their philosophy is quite beyond the 

 ken of the average capitalist, howsoever rich, and secondly, 

 because the American sociologists have not yet turned their 

 hand to a serious consideration of the trust in its purely 

 sociological bearings. 



The truth is that American sociologists are not yet ready 

 to consider the trust and the labor union as specific causes 

 in social progress. I am convinced that this work is reserved 

 for the younger generation of sociologists. The present lead- 

 ers of American thought in this line began their work more 

 than twenty years ago and they began at the bottom. Prac- 

 tically, they had to clear the ground for the new science which 

 they saw and knew must come and come with comparative 

 swiftness. It was not a question of soil und haben they were 

 confronted with, but rather with the most difficult task con- 

 ceivable, namely, of reducing to order, or to something akin 

 to order, the bewildering complexities of the motions of human 

 society, not only, but of all social action wherever found. 



In doing this they found that they were led backwards 

 instead of forwards ; downwards instead of upwards ; outwards 

 instead of inwards. They found that properly to understand 

 such a simple thing as the reason why women weep spontane- 

 ously at a funeral — quite without regard to the relationship 

 of the dead person to themselves — they were compelled to 

 dig up the entire zoological history of the human race and to 



