European economists, when speaking
of the working class, assume generally that it is fixed in residence and
contrast it with capital, which they say is fluid as between city and
city and even between country and country. American labor, however,
native as well as immigrant, is probably more mobile than capital; for,
tradition and habit which keep the great majority of European wage
earners in the place where their fathers and forefathers had lived
before them are generally absent in this country, except perhaps in
parts of New England and the South. It is therefore natural that the
cooperative spirit, which after all is but an enlarged and more
generalized form of the old spirit of neighborliness and mutual trust,
should have failed to develop to its full strength in America.
Another condition fatal to the development of the cooperative spirit is
the racial heterogeneity of the American wage-earning class, which
separates it into mutually isolated groups even as the social classes of
England and Scotland are separated by class spirit. As a result, we find
a want of mutual trust which depends so much on "consciousness of kind.
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