The Theory of Social Revolutions | Page 4

has been squeezed, as it were, from its rigid
eighteenth-century legal shell, and has passed into a fourth dimension
of space, where it performs its most important functions beyond the
cognizance of the law, which remains in a space of but three
dimensions. Washington encountered a somewhat analogous problem
when dealing with the thirteen petty independent states, which had
escaped from England; but his problem was relatively rudimentary.
Taking the theory of sovereignty as it stood, he had only to apply it to
communities. It was mainly a question of concentrating a sufficient

amount of energy to enforce order in sovereign social units. The whole
social detail remained unchanged. Our conditions would seem to imply
a very considerable extension and specialization of the principle of
sovereignty, together with a commensurate increment of energy, but
unfortunately the twentieth-century American problem is still further
complicated by the character of the envelope in which this highly
volatilized society is theoretically contained. To attain his object,
Washington introduced a written organic law, which of all things is the
most inflexible. No other modern nation has to consider such an
impediment.
Moneyed capital I take to be stored human energy, as a coal measure is
stored solar energy; and moneyed capital, under the stress of modern
life, has developed at once extreme fluidity, and an equivalent
compressibility. Thus a small number of men can control it in
enormous masses, and so it comes to pass that, in a community like the
United States, a few men, or even, in certain emergencies, a single man,
may become clothed with various of the attributes of sovereignty.
Sovereign powers are powers so important that the community, in its
corporate capacity, has, as society has centralized, usually found it
necessary to monopolize them more or less absolutely, since their
possession by private persons causes revolt. These powers, when vested
in some official, as, for example, a king or emperor, have been held by
him, in all Western countries at least, as a trust to be used for the
common welfare. A breach of that trust has commonly been punished
by deposition or death. It was upon a charge of breach of trust that
Charles I, among other sovereigns, was tried and executed. In short, the
relation of sovereign and subject has been based either upon consent
and mutual obligation, or upon submission to a divine command; but,
in either case, upon recognition of responsibility. Only the relation of
master and slave implies the status of sovereign power vested in an
unaccountable superior. Nevertheless, it is in a relation somewhat
analogous to the latter, that the modern capitalist has been placed
toward his fellow citizens, by the advances in applied science. An
example or two will explain my meaning.
High among sovereign powers has always ranked the ownership and

administration of highways. And it is evident why this should have
been so. Movement is life, and the stoppage of movement is death, and
the movement of every people flows along its highways. An invader
has only to cut the communications of the invaded to paralyze him, as
he would paralyze an animal by cutting his arteries or tendons.
Accordingly, in all ages and in all lands, down to the nineteenth century,
nations even partially centralized have, in their corporate capacity,
owned and cared for their highways, either directly or through
accountable agents. And they have paid for them by direct taxes, like
the Romans, or by tolls levied upon traffic, as many mediaeval
governments preferred to do. Either method answers its purpose,
provided the government recognizes its responsibility; and no
government ever recognized this responsibility more fully than did the
autocratic government of ancient Rome. So the absolute régime of
eighteenth-century France recognized this responsibility when Louis
XVI undertook to remedy the abuse of unequal taxation, for the
maintenance of the highways, by abolishing the corvée.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the application, by
science, of steam to locomotion, made railways a favorite speculation.
Forthwith, private capital acquired these highways, and because of the
inelasticity of the old law, treated them as ordinary chattels, to be
administered for the profit of the owner exclusively. It is true that
railway companies posed as public agents when demanding the power
to take private property; but when it came to charging for use of their
ways, they claimed to be only private carriers, authorized to bargain as
they pleased. Indeed, it grew to be considered a mark of efficient
railroad management to extract the largest revenue possible from the
people, along the lines of least resistance; that is, by taxing most
heavily those individuals and localities which could least resist. And
the claim by the railroads that they might do this as a matter of right
was long upheld by the courts,[2] nor