rcing up wages or prices as against
the others. In pure theory they may do this almost to any extent,
provided that the thing concerned is a necessity and is without a
substitute and provided that their organization is complete and
unbreakable. If all the people concerned in producing coal, masters and
men, owners of mines and operators of machinery, could stand out for
their price, there is no limit, short of putting all the rest of the
world on starvation rations, to what they might get. In practice and in
reality a thousand things intervene--the impossibility of such complete
unity, the organization of the other parties, the existing of national
divisions among industrial society, sentiment, decency, fear. The
proposition is only "pure theory." But its use as such is to dispose of
any such idea as that there is a natural price of coal or of anything
else.

The above is true of any article of necessity. It is true though in a
less degree of things of luxury. If all the makers of instruments of
music, masters and men, capitalists and workers, were banded together in
a tight and unbreakable union, then the other economic classes must
either face the horrors of a world without pianolas and trombones, or
hand over the price demanded. And what is true of coal and music is true
all through the whole mechanism of industry.

Or take the supreme case of the owners of land. If all of them acted
together, with their legal rights added into one, they could order the
rest of the world either to get off it or to work at starvation wages.

Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, standing at any moment
in a temporary and unstable equilibrium. But at any particular moment
the possibility of a huge and catastrophic shift such as those described
is out of the question except at the price of a general collapse. Even a
minor dislocation breaks down a certain part of the machinery of
society. Particular groups of workers are thrown out of place. There is
no other place where they can fit in, or at any rate not immediately.
The machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings are heard. The legal
framework of the State and of obedience to the law in which industrial
society is set threatens to break asunder. The attempt at social change
threatens a social revolution in which the whole elaborate mechanism
would burst into fragments.

In any social movement, then, change and alteration in a new direction
must be balanced against the de