ce and history, and
plans out an ideal society in which all the conditions are to be
different, he is a law-giver or prophet, and those may listen to him
who have leisure.

The modern industrial system is a great social co-operation. It is
automatic and instinctive in its operation. The adjustments of the
organs take place naturally. The parties are held together by
impersonal force--supply and demand. They may never see each other;
they may be separated by half the circumference of the globe. Their
co-operation in the social effort is combined and distributed again by
financial machinery, and the rights and interests are measured and
satisfied without any special treaty or convention at all. All this
goes on so smoothly and naturally that we forget to notice it. We think
that it costs nothing--does itself, as it were. The truth is, that this
great co-operative effort is one of the great products of
civilization--one of its costliest products and highest refinements,
because here, more than anywhere else, intelligence comes in, but
intelligence so clear and correct that it does not need expression.

Now, by the great social organization the whole civilized body (and
soon we shall say the whole human race) keeps up a combined assault on
Nature for the means of subsistence. Civilized society may be said to
be maintained in an unnatural position, at an elevation above the
earth, or above the natural state of human society. It can be
maintained there only by an efficient organization of the social effort
and by capital. At its elevation it supports far greater numbers than
it could support on any lower stage. Members of society who come into
it as it is today can live only by entering into the organization. If
numbers increase, the organization must be perfected, and capital must
increase--_i.e._, power over Nature. If the society does not keep up
its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it
falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose,
and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members.
Hence human society lives at a constant strain forward and upward, and
those who have most interest that this strain be successfully kept up,
that the social organization be perfected, and that capital be
increased, are those at the bottom.

The notion of property which prevails among us today is, that a man has
a right to the thing which he has made by his labor. This is a ver