the vulgar materialists have contributed their little share to the general confusion. Of course brute force has been and will be used by all ruling classes, both in acquiring and maintaining their dominion. But brute force alone never did, and never could, sustain a ruling class for any considerable length of time. In order to see the correctness of this assertion it is sufficient to bring to mind the fact that the ruling class is always a minority, usually a small one, of the population of a country, and that, taken man for man, the members of the ruling class seldom possess more physical strength than the members of the subject class. The force of the ruling class is not natural but acquired, and is social in its character. It consists in its organization, which permits it to use part of the strength of the subject class, and sometimes the whole of it, for the subjugation of that class. Sometimes the mere fact of its own organized condition may be sufficient to hold the superior but disorganized force of the subject-class in awe and trembling. But even then it is not mere brute force, for organization itself is a moral and not a physical force. This is evidenced by our language; we speak of a physically superior force, which is incapable of properly exerting itself for lack of proper organization and discipline, as being "demoralized." This applies, however, only in exceptional cases. Usually the ruling class depends on something outside its own organization to maintain its supremacy. This something is the social organization of the whole community or nation. It is by using the power of the whole social system for its own purposes that the ruling class is able to maintain its supremacy at a time when that is clearly against the general interest or against the interest of large portions of the subject class or classes.
The basis of this social power exercised by the ruling class is usually the economic system in vogue, which makes the subject-class economically necessarily dependent upon the ruling class. But this does not always suffice. Very
