Compulsory distribution; violence.

1. Distribution is sometimes compulsory, by force or fraud. This crude and primitive mode of distribution, the negation of personal liberty, never has been quite eliminated. In every country an unhappily large number of men from time to time break over into crime, from violence and highway robbery down to sneak-thieving, pocket-picking, and bunco games. Not more than ten per cent, of this criminal element is at any one time in prison. This method of personal distribution, not hinted at in most theories of distribution, determines a large part of the income of tens of thousands of men in this country and concerns the distribution of millions of dollars. These enemies of society appropriate whatever they can, and the law stops them if it is able.

Chattel slavery.

Slavery is distribution by legalized force, but the force is not legalized by the consent of the victims. The evolution of the harsher slavery may be traced through various forms of milder serfdom. There is found an element of this in the freest existing societies; men unwilling are forced to do things. A patent example is the convict on a chain-gang, a slave to society as a penalty for his violation of its commands. But some radical reformers today claim that present society is wholly based on legalized force, and that the working-man is essentially a slave. Their ideal cannot be realized without dissolving social bonds and destroying civilization; yet the presence, even in our society, of this forced, unwilling submission on the part of some of its members can* not be ignored.

War indemnities.

A similar example of forcible taking is seen in case of war. Savage tribes plunder and take captive their weaker neighbors. Conquering modern nations usually exact tribute from defeated enemies. Germany got a billion dollars from France, Japan a quarter of a billion from China. The terms of peace at the close of our great Civil War were the most liberal ever granted by conqueror to vanquished; and yet the federal pensions granted to Northern soldiers are a form of tribute, being paid by taxes falling alike upon the North and the South. In all these cases the distribution by force is unwillingly suffered. In none of them is it reducible to economic rules or capable of a strict economic explanation.

2. Distribution may be charitable, that is, determined by considerations of benevolence and affection. Charitable is here used in its original sense, as synonymous with love or affection. First to be mentioned is the love of parents, the root and type of all the forms of charity. The lack of economic equivalence in the relation of parent and child is complete in early years.. The helpless infant gives nothing economic to the parent, the parent gives all to the child. Gradually, however, the balance is regained; as the years go on, not only does the child repay in affection but in many cases he repays in material ways. In the factory districts and on the farm the child in early years begins to reestablish the balance, becomes a worker, and contributes as much as the cost of his support, and finally more. A student of modern English town life has traced the curve of poverty traversed by the average child of the poor, as the family moves, now below, again above, the level of minimum income required for. physical efficiency. In the middle or propertied classes the children do not for many years take the burden from the parents, and it is doubtful whether in most cases the economic balance is ever reestablished. It is not to the parents, but to the succeeding generation, that the debt is vicariously paid.

Charitable distribution within the family.

Friendship widens the range of generosity and multiplies the mass of gifts. Broad sentiments of humanity lead to gifts outside the range of personal affection and personal interest, to the beggar on the street, to institutions devoted to charity. In New York state about twenty million dollars a year is given to charity, and in the country at large many times as much. In the year 1901 over one hundred million dollars was given to education in the United States by private donors; and that high mark will no doubt soon be passed. Gifts in cases of great disasters, as the Irish and Indian famines, the Chicago fire, the Galveston flood, the eruption of Mount Pelee, bespeak a widening generosity. Religion impels to the building of churches, to the support of priests, missions, and manifold religious undertakings. Charity in this connection is the expression of a sentiment that varies from the broadest and most general humanitarian sentiment to the most intense and ardent personal affection.

And in larger circles.

Authoritative distribution in the despotic state.

3. Distribution may be by an authority willingly acknowledged. The two preceding forms of distribution, force and love, shade off into this form. In them the ones from whom goods are taken or to whom they are given have no power to change the conditions; here is to be considered the case where the person bows willingly to the superior power and takes what that power accords him. There are few despotisms in which the government is not based on the wishes and average capacities of the governed. If the citizens as a body really desired and were deserving of better government, in most cases they could get it. Much is heard, for example, of despotism in Russia, and of the abject condition of the people; but travelers testify that while many in the educated student classes are filled with the greatest discontent, and the intelligent subject peoples, such as the Finns, detest their rulers, such sentiments are far from general throughout the empire. The power of the Czar could not exist for a single moment if the mass of the people did not look to him as the great father whom they venerate and love. If this is true, the despotism in Russia, though abhorrent to our ideals of freedom, is fitted to the aspirations of the mass of the people. So far as government determines income, the authority distributing income there, as elsewhere, is one willingly acknowledged.