itive society, variations in the toil performed by men, but it has not been compatible with the purposes of this book to enter into these variations fully. The endeavor is made in this Part I to give a broad general survey only of the evolution of industrial society.

CHAPTER IV

ECONOMIC CLASSES

WE have seen in previous chapters that the evolution of society has meant an ever increasing differentiation. From another standpoint, this means that there is a greater and greater variety in the groups of persons having common characteristics. Race, nationality, ability, education, moral qualities, religious beliefs, manners, wealth, and occupation, each affords a basis for a different classification. But, ordinarily, when we speak of classes in society, we have in mind those class divisions which affect the social intercourse of people, and which give them a higher or lower rank. The "Century Dictionary" defines a class as "An order or rank of persons; a number of persons having certain characteristics in common, as equality in rank, intellectual influence, education, property, occupation, habits of life, etc." In the present discussion we are concerned with the influence exerted by the economic organization and constitution of society1 on the formation of class distinctions. It is to these that we refer when we speak of economic classes.

1 The distribution of wealth is included.

In the earliest stages of society, we have seen, the women are the principal workers. Later, slaves are forced to labor for the community. Then we find the workers becoming free, but at first they stand at the bottom of the social scale. Among the Greeks and Romans, commerce and industry were considered unworthy pursuits for a citizen. In the caste system of India the industrial class occupies a position only one grade higher than that. of the servile class. Step by step the wealth-producing members of society have won for themselves social recognition, and to-day we in America look with growing disfavor upon a man who lives upon an inherited income without engaging in some "useful" occupation. But the workers have themselves become differentiated, and increasingly so with the growing complexity of modern business life.

It has often been said that we have no classes in America. Our federal Constitution says that no title of nobility shall be granted either by the United States or by any state. The law is supposed to guarantee every man an equal vote, regardless of his property, his education, his birth, or even his color. Every child, we have been fond of saying, has an equal chance of rising to the highest position either in the political or the industrial world. "In the United States," said De Tocqueville, writing in 1833, "professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling

is honorable." To be sure, even in his day there were rich and poor, but, he remarks, "the class of rich men does not exist; for these rich individuals have no feeling or purposes in common, no mutual traditions or mutual hopes; there are individuals, therefore, but no definite class." 1

This same writer, however, also gave a warning. The extensive subdivision of labor and the resulting large-scale production, he saw, was working a change. In this connection he observes: "The master and workman have then here no similarity, and their differences increase every day. They are only connected as two rings at the extremities of a long chain. Each of them fills the station which is made for him and which he does not leave the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the other, and seems as much born to obey as that other is to command. What is this but Aristocracy?" 2

Some fifty years later another foreign observer wrote: "There are no struggles between privileged and unprivileged orders, not even that perpetual strife of rich and poor which is the oldest disease of civilized states. One must not pronounce broadly that there are no classes, for in parts of the country social distinctions have begun to grow up. But for political purposes classes scarcely exist. No one of the questions which now agitate the nation is a question between rich and poor.

1 De Tocqueville, "Democracy in America," Boston, 1873, Vol. II, pp. 186 and 196. 2 Ibid., p. 195.

Instead of suspicion, jealousy, and arrogance embittering the relations of classes, good feeling and kindliness reign." 1 This was written in 1888, but the author, in a later edition of his book (1894) suggests that possibly the view might seem too roseate, although he hesitates to "let matured conclusions be suddenly modified by passing events."

In recent years we have been hearing much about the struggle between the laboring class and the capitalist class. There are those who think that the words which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, in the "Communist Manifesto," in 1848, find support in the present economic conditions in the United States. These writers said: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open, fight, that each time ended, either in revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society in various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,

1 Bryce, "The American Commonwealth," 3d ed., Vol. II, P. 599.