relations with other peoples is sanctioned by the same tacit assumption.
The fundamental grievance of classes against other classes in modern society is that the supposed offenders are violators of this primal law of reciprocity. Criticisms of institutions or of the persons operating them resolve themselves into charges that whereas the parties in question are presumed to be useful social agencies, they are in reality using their social office for the subordination of public weal to private gain. This is at bottom the charge of the dissatisfied proletarian of all classes against employers, capitalists, corporations, trusts, monopolies, legislators and administrators. This is also in large part the implied countercharge against organized labor. The most serious count in the wage-earner's indictment of other classes is not primarily that these classes draw too much pay, but that they are not doing the work that their revenues are supposed to represent. They are exploiting their fellows instead of serving them. The question of the amount of pay which the alleged delinquents should draw, if their presumed service were actually performed, is logically a secondary consideration. The just grievance of the poor man is not so much that another man's income is a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million a year, as that either figure is more than its possessor earns.
Back of all formal contracts or statutes or institutions, therefore, is this unwritten law of civilization that every citizen shall be a public servant. The cycles of social growth, arrest, decay, have always illustrated in turn observance, neglect and violation of this law. Men and institutions have begun by serving their day and generation in a socially needful way. They have sometimes ended by making their day and generation serve them in a socially harmful way. Then has come social condemnation, rejection, substitution.
Such an institution as feudalism, for example, served its purpose as a division of labor between warriors and magistrates on the one hand, and tillers of the soil on the other. When the world grew more compact, when causes of war affected larger
