In the industrial sphere this reaction took the
form of extreme devolution, known as laissez-faire individualism. Each
economic decision was to be made by the man who had title to the
property involved. Since almost everything was owned by somebody,
there would be somebody to manage everything. This was plural
sovereignty with a vengeance.
It was economic government by anybody's economic philosophy, though it
was supposed to be controlled by immutable laws of political economy
that must in the end produce harmony. It produced many splendid
things, but enough sordid and terrible ones to start counter-currents.
One of these was the trust, which established a kind of Roman peace
within industry, and a Roman predatory imperialism outside. People
turned to the legislature for relief. They invoked representative
government, founded on the image of the township farmer, to regulate
the semi-sovereign corporations. The working class turned to labor
organization. There followed a period of increasing centralization and
a sort of race of armaments. The trusts interlocked, the craft unions
federated and combined into a labor movement, the political system
grew stronger at Washington and weaker in the states, as the reformers
tried to match its strength against big business.
In this period practically all the schools of socialist thought from
the Marxian left to the New Nationalists around Theodore Roosevelt,
looked upon centralization as the first stage of an evolution which
would end in the absorption of all the semi-sovereign powers of
business by the political state.
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