These illegal privileges confer advantages different in degree, but not in kind, from those enjoyed by the coal-carrying railroads in the anthracite region, whose monopoly of transportation made it impossible for mine-owners to retain their properties. There is, fortunately, no difference of opinion as to the necessity of breaking up the alliance between industrial combinations and railroad companies. The problem, however, is becoming much more complicated under the extension of the community-of-interest plan. The Atlantic shipping combination will have a sort of lien on the freight of certain powerful railroads, and it will not be easy for non-trust ship-owners to compete with the great combination.

The dependence of trusts upon monopoly of natural resources is less obvious, except in such cases as the anthracite coal combination or the steel combination. This is not the place to raise the question of private vs. public ownership of land and natural resources generally, but it may be pointed out that the principle of private property in land does not justify the appropriation of nature's gifts by the few, and the exclusion of the many from the enjoyment of those gifts. There are no agricultural trusts in America, because of the beneficent operation of the homestead acts and the virtual application of the occupancy-anduse principle. Have the right principles been followed in the disposition of other parts of the general inheritance- mines, for example ? Voices have been raised for the acquisition by the public of the anthracite coal mines, and whatever we may think of the merit of the plan, it involves a recognition of a fundamental fact. If it can be shown that trusts derive their power, not from the possession of capital, but from special privileges related to natural opportunity, will not the remedy have to be sought in establishment of equality of opportunity?

Finally, since there is so general an agreement as to the necessity of preserving potential competition as a check upon actual monopoly, has not the question of credit, the supply of capital to the business community by the banks, been unduly neglected so far as it bears on the possibilities of competition? A rigid, inadequate, crude currency and banking system favors

concentration and monopoly. It discourages limited enterprises by prohibitory interest rates. Branch banking and asset currency would constitute anti-trust agents of no mean influence, though they are fiercely opposed by the average man on account of their supposed tendency to monopoly in credit and banking.

To each of these remedial proposals objections are offered, but is not this true of any anti-trust suggestion? None meets with universal acceptance, and reform by unanimous consent is someting unknown in politico-social history. The individualists have nothing better to propose; they believe that the indicated remedies would be adequate. But it is impossible to blink the fact that society is disposed to try restrictive and prohibitive measures first. Monopoly is making conscious and unconscious socialists at an amazing rate.

VICTOR S. YARROS.

CHICAGO.

THE BASIS OF SOCIALITY.

a

To join the hue and cry against Spencer's analogical comparison of society with an organism, though popular in certain sociological circles, is paying but scant respect to the real value of one of the pioneer attempts to secure a scientific basis for that foundling science—sociology. As a heuristisches Princip its most perdurable value lies in the fact that it has materially aided in the consideration of the sociological as a continuation of the biological. Strictly speaking, the biological probably includes human interaction or the social phenomena of human life, but for the purposes of a division of labor in the scientific world there has been a strong unconscious, though some unkind critic will say all too conscious, current in favor of founding a new discipline and department of human knowledge. Certainly the problems are ample enough to justify the division, and despite the similarity of laws the differences are sufficient to mark the boundaries of a new province of scientific research. Darwin's Origin of Species was really a description of organic technology, and the extra-organic sense and motor organs of social evolution are but the extensions of the tools and instruments which were so successful in the organic conflict. Organic heredity is continued in social heredity, the instinctive giving way, as second in importance, to oral and written tradition and the transmission of institutional life. The organic gains of the individual become objectified and perpetuated for all time in the environment, and an attainable object of possession for all socially minded people. The language of gestures of organic biology becomes the language of symbols with its priceless economy of time and labor. These laws and many others provide ample scope for the most untiring laborer and the most brilliant genius in the field of research. Spencer's analogy, therefore, is insufficient, and the attempt to base sociology on the specifications laid down for an organism is but little superior to the attempts of certain other sociologists who find all sociology bound up in the consciousness of kind or in the psychological process of imitation. Spencer, however, did point to the continuity of law as is evidenced in the biological and sociological worlds. Instead of an organism he could have used a species with much greater effect, for in a species are found, although in a crude and rudimentary stage, the first beginnings of social life.

One of the most striking, and yet at the same time one of the least observed, facts about specific action is the pre-eminence of the specific as such. The individual is secondary to the species. Instincts, which are characteristically the grand trunk line of transmission and continuity in the lower orders of the zoological series, are peculiar and very important in this, that they are always in their origin and bloom for the benefit of the species to which the animal may belong which possesses the instinct. They are of benefit to the individual only secondarily, in so far as that individual may be of benefit to the species. The mother gives up her life for the child. She dies, but the child, and through it the species, lives. The salmon struggles up the Columbia river for a thousand miles, is torn and battered by the rocks and waterfalls on the long and weary journey, lays its eggs, and dies; but the race lives on, although at the loss and sacrifice of one of its best members. The long history of the mammalia or mothers is a record of innumerable such examples. Of course, it is not necessarily true that the individual performs an instinctive act in order that the species may be benefited, but the persistent fact remains that in the long run only those species and individuals survive which act in such a way that the species may be further propagated. Instincts are always for species or race preservation. They are specific, altruistic, other-regarding, profoundly social. They may not be all consciously such, but in their origin and bloom they are in their final import intensely social. It is a question of survival. It is a question of propagation and of the safety and welfare of the propagated. The individuals of a species which do not propagate obviously nullify the probability of like descendants. That which militates against the species thereby niilitates against the survival of the members of that species. The species that survives is characterized by the

fact that its members act in such a manner that descendants are provided, and also provided for in some way or other. The goal of their activities is the young and their welfare. The young are heirs of all efforts directly or indirectly (Erziehung, eine Fortsetzung der Erzeugung). In the highest mammalian species, man, art, religion, and science are, in the long run, directly or indirectly, means for more certain perpetuation of the species and the more certain welfare of the same. The rank of a species is determined by the degree of such care for the young. The survival of the fittest means the survival of the parental, and all efforts are to be judged according to a parental standard. The greatest good to the greatest number must also be interpreted in a similar manner, not as the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but as such parental conduct, direct or indirect, as will be most conducive to the propagation and welfare of the species. As Herbert Spencer says, the continued life of the species is in every case the end to which all other ends are secondary (Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 591). Through many stages of provincial patriotism and group-exclusiveness we have forged on until on the not far distant sky-line we see a state outlined where all humanity is our fatherland. All conduct is judged by nature according to the standard of survival.

In an organism, to recur to the Spencerian analogy, the conduct of the parts is determined by the welfare of the whole. That part which is detrimental to the whole organism is suicidal in tendency either immediately or mediately through the destruction of the whole organism. The safety of the parts lies in their general social efficiency. Their existence and perpetuation lie in their service to the general organization of which they form a part. To this extent an organism is similar to society, and to this extent is Spencer's analogy pertinent. Neither the science of sociology nor the science of ethical conduct, it is evident, can be drawn from the individual as such. Plato, it seems, saw this when he endeavored to derive the true significance of justice and righteousness from the state, and not from the individual.

It seems plain, then, that the individual as such has no