The autocratic system has evidently a special advantage in a time of rapid and confused development, when conditions are little understood or regulated, and the state of things is one of somewhat blind and ruthless warfare; but it is quite possible that as the new industries become established and comparatively stable, there will be a commercial as well as a social demand for a system that shall invite and utilize more of the good-will and self-activity of the workman. “The system which comes nearest to calling out all the self-interests and using all the faculties and sharing all the benefits will outcompete any system that strikes a lower level of motive faculty and profit.”[120] And the penetrating thinker who wrote this sentence believed that the function of the autocratic “captain of industry” was essentially that of an explorer and conqueror of new domains destined to come later under the rule of a commonwealth. Indeed the rise, on purely commercial grounds, of a more humane and individualizing tendency, aiming in one way or another to propitiate the self-feeling of the workman and get him to identify himself with his work, is well ascertained. Among the familiar phases of this are the notable growth of coöperative production and exchange in Belgium, Russia and other European countries, the increasing respect for labor unions and the development by large concerns of devices for insurance, for pensions, for profit-sharing and for the material and social comfort of their employees. “As a better government has come up from the people than came down from the kings, so a better industry appears to be coming up from the people than came down from the capitalists.”[121] In some form or other the democratic principle is sure to make its way into the economic system. Coöperation, labor unions, public regulation, public ownership and the informal control of opinion will no doubt all have a part; the general outcome being that the citizen becomes a more vital agent in the life of the whole. Before discussing further the power of the capitalist-manager class, we ought to think out clearly just what we mean by social power, since nowhere are we more likely to go astray than in vagueness regarding such notions.