Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/270

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234
ESSAYS OF WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

siders satisfactory, for purposes which he considers worth obtaining. It is only another of the confusions which have been introduced into this subject that a juggle is made here on the word "free." It is declared that the contract is not free, because it is made under the existing conditions of the market, which may be hard for one of the parties — an objection which is entirely irrelevant, since the only "freedom" which can here come into account, where the proposition is to use civil and social coercion, is civil and social freedom. If, then, a man is making a contract, how can anybody else judge for him what conditions he shall submit to or what ends he ought to consider worth attaining? His final and perfectly conclusive answer is: I will, or, I will not. Now if one man can force another, by virtue of law and social force, to enter into a contract which is not satisfactory to him — that is to say, which is not the best one that he thinks he can make — then the latter is a slave and the relationship might serve as a definition of slavery. This is as true if the victim is an employer as if he were an employee.

Industrial war is, in fact, an incident of liberty. It is an inconvenience; it is doubtful if it is an evil. The greatest injustice about war is that it imposes loss and harm on those who are not parties to it. If two nations go to war, they interfere with all their neighbors by breaking up the regular currents of trade and industry and cutting off the ten thousand relations of various kinds which have sprung up during peace and which affect the happiness and welfare of all mankind. It is so in industrial war. Strikes and railroad wars cause loss and inconvenience to thousands who are not parties to the quarrel at all, because they upset all those social and industrial relationships upon which the regularity and