Criminality of Rulers; P. Sorokin

means or, under the existing circumstances, would be unable to obtain them at all for their "professionaf' operations. Some of the disastrous results of such a situa tion are obvious. One or a few criminals could then intimidate others and dictate their orders to commu nities, both large and small, spreading death and de struction to hundreds and thousands. Still more catastrophic would be the results of a mis use of these weapons by the rulers of the states, of military forces, of business-empires, of political parties, Dr. Sorokin is Professor of Sociology, Harvard University. This article is from his address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 1956. [425 ] of fanatical groups-even of international bodies like the United Nations, and others who may become legally empowered to control these weapons so that they would have at their disposal a vast accumulation of these in struments of death and destruction. We cannot fool ourselves with the belief that such leaders would never misuse or abuse their power and responsibility. The ugly facts of human history decisively confirm the validity of Lord Acton's dictum: "Power tends to corrupt and abso lute power corrupts absolutely. Great [political] men are almost always bad men." And in correspondence with him Creighton quoted John Bright's utterance: "If the people knew what sort of men statesmen were, they would rise and hang the whole lot of them."

A High Proportion Our own investigation of the criminality of the rulers English, Russian, French, Austrian, Turkish kings, as well as the presidents and political bosses of republics shows that one out of four of these rulers, these auto cratic monarchs and dictatorial bosses of republics and democracies, has been a qualified murderer (patricide, matricide, uxoricide, fratricide, etc.). In other words, the rulers of the states are the most criminal group in their respective populations. Their criminality tends to de crease with a limitation of their power, but it still remains exceptionally high in all nations. We .have no grounds for believing that contemporary and near-future rulers will miraculously tum into wise [426 ] and blameless saints who would not misuse these fearful nuclear arms by starting a nuclear international or civil warfare. In the light of these data, the most dangerous group for the whole of mankind is the group of rulers, assisted by the morally irresponsible scientists and inventors of destructive means. It is exactly this group who might any day unleash the greatest catastrophe for the whole of humanity that we have ever known.

Unless we can discover how to diffuse rather than to concentrate political and other power of man over man, we can expect only new catastrophies capable of ending the creative mission of humanity on this planet. This discovery will require fresh and fundamental research into problems of criminality, war, government, morality, individual and bibal egotism, and the like. [427 ] DO UNIONS CAUSE AUTOMATION? THE POPULAR assumption that labor unions can raise the wages of the working population has been exploded repeatedly. F. A. Harper, in a FREEMAN series on C'Why Wages Rise," expertly demonstrated that unions merely impede productivity and therefore generally retard real wages. This is not to deny that unions may temporarily raise the wages of a restricted number of members through strikes and other coercive practices. But this inevitably leads to unemployment in the unionized in dustries. Consequently, labor tends to shift to nonunion ized industries and thus depresses their wages. We can presently observe these effects in the form of unemploy ment in the rigidly unionized building industries and the absorption of additional workers in many white collar occupations.