were in response to the changing character and demands of the community. Accordingly we find that political institutions are democratic or despotic in their character in proportion to the amount of diversifying experiences in the industrial life of the people. For many ages progress moved with halting, unsteady step, and centuries passed with but little perceptible advance, because the movement was one of blundering experiment devoid of scientific guidance. We have reached the stage, however, where this is wholly inade. quate. Feeling and fate can no longer be trusted to steer the tendency of society. The silent influence of association through involuntary contact and intercourse must ever do its work, but, with the advance towards more complex social life, conscious organized direction of social forces becomes indispensable to orderly progress. It is said of the jellyfish that life is so little concentrated and so thoroughly dispersed throughout the entire organism that the fish may be cut up into small pieces and each piece will live on just as before, because there is no center of life, practically no interdependent action of functions, each piece having about as much life and functional activity as any other, and can get along when segregated as well as when integrated with the whole.

In the early ages society was in the jellyfish state of formation. Industry was too simple and homogeneous to be set back by any single disturbance if it did not involve the actual killing off of the population. But, as society advanced, all that changed. Today our industrial conditions are so highly concentrated that the life centers are very intense, and a disturbance of certain functions will create hysteria and paralysis throughout the whole system. A mere political election which disturbs the business confidence of the country will create an industrial depression and perhaps a financial panic. No such thing could have been possible in this country one hundred and fifty years ago. Nor is such a thing yet possible in Asia, Africa, South America or Russia. It is fundamental importance that the di

rection of progressive forces be scientifically understood, because a mistake now means calamity. It is as true of society as of industrial relations and mechanical contrivances that, while complexity of structure gives greater efficiency, it involves more accurate knowledge and scientific direction.

Clearly, then, if congress is to continue without painful reaction, intelligent direction must guide the forces of societary movement. This involves a new type of association. Mere involuntary intercourse, unconscious stimulus to activity, is no longer adequate. Intelligent, organized leadership, not dictation, is now needed. Civilization itself has made this indispensable to orderly progress in the future. Fortunately, the spirit of organization is already abroad. In the field of industry, politics, labor, sociology and philanthropy the work of organization has really begun. In this country we are on the threshold of a new era in nation building. Whether progress of the republic in this century shall be an orderly movement towards a higher plane of democratic civilization, in which the social life and character of the millions shall advance commensurately with the growth of wealth and invention, will depend largely upon the economic and social sanity of this great organization movement. Now, as always, industry is in the lead. No progress has ever come in the past, nor can any come in the future, without this force, because it is through the development of industry that the increase of wealth and welfare in society alone becomes possible. Higher standards of social life and their concomitants in intelligence, culture, freedom and well-being throughout the community can come only by and along with increase of wealth. Whether the progress of the great industrial forces shall continue, and commensurate social advance be secured, or aggregated wealth shall be arrayed against society and disintegration endanger democracy, will depend largely upon the influence of organization upon the public opinion and the leadership of public policy.

The primary forces of social advance

of capitalists and leaders of industry; that is the function of society; this is the work of organization in the various fields of social activity. The great function of capital and the captains of industry is to create wealth. It is our duty to secure its distribution, and it is primarily for this purpose that organized action is indispensable to social advance. Capital has learned that progress in production cannot be secured by haphazard, disintegrating and obstructive policies. Experience has taught them, and they are learning the lesson well, that science, knowledge of nature,

of government have to deal. But this is not a matter of arbitrary edict, summary legislation or the coercive power of organization. Distribution is no less the result of natural economic law than is production. Indeed, it is an inseparable part of the same process. The increased increment of wealth in a community, available for social distribution without impairing the principal, is what economists have called surplus value or profit, which includes rent and interest. These constitute the great fund from which all increase in the world's wealth and welfare can be drawn. The dis

tribution to the masses goes in the form of wages and salaries. There are but two ways in which the distribution to the masses can be permanently increased. One is by the increase of wages and the other by the fall of prices or cheapening of commodities. By this process, the worker in every sphere of usefulness receives more wealth for a day's work.

Two things, therefore, are essential to popular progress: First, that profits be continuously created; second, that they be commensurately transferred to the public through lower prices and higher wages. At this point the influence of organization may easily be misdirected.

The temptation is very strong to restrict the efforts of capital and limit the increase of production instead of stimulating the influences which increase distribution. But, if organization is to fill its proper function, and do the work that civilization demands at its hands, it must be an auxiliary and not a hindrance to the great industrial movement of the age. It must act as a positive force in stimulating distribution and not as a negative force, obstructing production.

The medium through which wealth distribution among the masses takes places in modern society is wages, and this is increasing as society advances. Every step of progress in productive industry, since the birth of the factory system, has tended more and more to transfer individual producers into wage and salary receivers. So that, those who live upon profits and the surplus increment of capital are gradually becoming a proportionately smaller, and the wage and salary receivers a proportionately larger, element in the community. Since, in the nature of things, the increased wealth of the community first flows to the receivers of surplus, or capitalists, and can only be transferred to the community through wages, manifestly the steady and general increase of wages is the crucial fact in social improvement and national advance. How to stimulate this advancing movement of wages, then, is the question. Wages are not a matter of individual caprice or

arbitrary dictum, but are governed by natural law. It is not within the power of capital or of government or of organization arbitrarily to increase wages. Wages can be permanently influenced only through the operation of the social and economic forces which govern all other economic movements.

For centuries it was believed that wages were a matter entirely within the power of the master's decision. This was so thoroughly accepted that, for hundreds of years in England, wages were fixed by law. In the 14th and 15th centuries it was a penal offense for laborers to ask for more wages than the statute provided. Under the Tudors the wages were fixed twice a year by proclamation of the magistrates in the different counties. Despite the power of authority, which was well nigh absolute, backed by the influence of the masters, the church and the throne, it was found absolutely impossible to compel wages to obey the authorized standard. From Edward III. to William IV. the statute books of England are bestrewn with acts and proclamations attempting to regulate wages, but all in vain.

The evidence of the failure thus to fix wages accompanied the enactment of every new statute upon the subject. The literature of the period, from the statute of laborers (1350) to the repeal of the conspiracy act (1824), is a continuous record of the failure to govern wages by authority. The development of economic thought, and the substitution of scientific for authoritative and coercive methods of dealing with sociological questions, has given us the key to this failure. We now know, as the schoolmen in the middle ages and the politicians of the eighteenth and a large part of the nineteenth century did not, that wages are a social product; that the price of service, like the price of every other marketable quantity in society, is primarily determined by what it costs to furnish it. This means that instead of wages being an arbitrary quantity to be fixed by the master or the magistrate, or by the mere demand and supply of laborers, they are really governed by the social standard of living of

the wage class. It is not even an individual matter; it is beyond the power of the individual laborer to regulate his own wages, just as it is beyond the power of the individual manufacturer to regulate the price of his own product.

Just as the prices of products are subject to the action and reaction of the economic forces which are focused in the market-place, so wages are ultimately governed by the standard of living which social custom and habit have made necessary in the group or class to which the laborers belong. That explains why we find wages in certain in

footed and naked above the waist, they have no use for a dollar or two dollars a day. They would not know what to do with it, hence they make no demand for it, and so long as they are content to live upon less there is no power in society or in the universe that will give them more.

This was forcibly illustrated by Sir Thomas Brassey when he was building the British railroads in India. He had taken with him a number of Irish and English navvies but employed a large number of Hindoos. He thought they lacked energy and could do a great deal

dustries and localities tending to uniformity. But the standard of uniformity differs in different localities in the same country; differs in different countries, and is different for women than for men. If we ask why are the workers for a thousand millions of the human race receiving less than fifteen cents a day, there is only one answer. It is because their standard of living, the established demands of their social life, the conditions under which they are willing peacefully to live and work, can be sustained by fifteen cents a day. In India and Africa, where the people go bare

more if they were tempted to do so by offering a greater reward. He was giving them a shilling a week, and raised their pay to two shillings, whereupon, to his surprise, he found that they would only work three days out of the six. When he investigated to discover the reason he found that a shilling would furnish their necessities and they had no motive to work for more than they needed, and he had to take off the shilling to make them work the other three days.

This principle is found to operate everywhere. Wages are slightly higher

in Russia than in Asia, higher in Germany and France than in Russia, higher in England than on the continent and higher in the United States than in England; and in this country they are higher in the east and west than they are in the south; they are higher in the large cities than they are in the rural districts, and men's wages are higher than women's. If we seek for the explanation of this we shall find that, in every instance, it arises from the same cause, namely, the difference in the cost and standard of living. Nobody would think of offering an American mechanic the wages that are readily accepted in Asia; not because employers would not like to pay that small amount, but because it is obvious that his social standard of living forbids it. He could not live on that amount, and this fact is so imperative that if the industries of the United States depended upon American laborers receiving Asiatic wages, the industries would perish. This principle is so all-pervading that it has been found by extensive investigation, to respond to almost imperceptible social perturbation. For instance, in the borough of Brooklyn, which is divided from New York only by the East River, trade unions, with all their power of close, compact organization in the same federation with New York, have not been able to keep mechanics' wages in Brooklyn up to the New York standard. For a long time the unions were at a loss to understand this. They did the same work, were just as well organized, had just as many strikes, and yet the standard was never raised quite so high. The reason, which is now recognized, is that rents are lower in Brooklyn than in New York, which means that the cost of living is less, and that, therefore, higher wages are socially necessary in New York than in Brooklyn, and higher wages are always paid. The same is true of other cities, and the trade-union standard rates are adjusted accordingly.

Another important sociological fact in this connection, which has been equally well established, is that it is the standard, or cost, of the living of the family

and not of the individual that is the great determining fact in wages. The reason for this is simple enough when seen from the correct point of view. It is that the living of the family must be furnished by the laborer's income. In considering his wages it is not a question of what the laborer could feed, clothe and house himself for, but what it will cost him to do this for his family. The family is the great social unit, and it must be sustained. The social standard of the family, of course, is the standard that the customs and habits of the group or class have established. Extensive investigation has shown that in industries where the man furnishes the sole income for the family the wages are higher, and proportionately lower in those industries and groups where a family income is partly supplied by the women or children in addition to the man. John Stuart Mill even caught a glimpse of this in the factory conditions of England. It has been scientifically verified by the investigations in Massachusetts. This means that if the standard of living of a given class of laborers requires eight hundred dollars a year, and three hundred can be supplied by the wife or children working, the wages of the man will be only five hundred, and if the children go to school and the wife stays at home, and the family depends upon the earnings of the man, the same standard of living will force the man's wages to eight hundred instead of five.

The same principle explains why women's wages are generally lower than men's. It is not because of the difference of sex, nor the lack of the right to vote, as is sometimes suggested; but at bottom it is really because of the difference in the cost of living. As a rule women are not the chief breadwinners for the family. Consequently a larger number are dependent for support upon the average man than upon the average woman. It may be urged, with some truth, that the average women are fully as expensive as men. Nobody knows this better than the men, but it is also a well-established fact in civilized society, that a large portion of