374 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 



when there grow up in one place, as a Manchester or a 

 Birmingham, many establishments of like kind, this process 

 is carried still further. There arise factors and agents, who 

 are the channels through which are transmitted the pro- 

 duce of many mills ; and we believe that primarily, these 

 factors were manufacturers who undertook to dispose of the 

 produce of smaller houses as well as their own, and ultimately 

 became salesmen only. Now this, which is the original 

 mode in which social agencies of all kinds are evolved, 

 does not continue to be the mode. There is a tendency 

 everywhere manifested to substitute a direct process for this 

 indirect process. Manufacturing establishments are no 

 longer commonly developed through the series of modifica- 

 tions above described ; but mostly arise by the immediate 

 transformation of a number of persons into master, clerks, 

 foremen, workers, &c. Instead of business-partnerships 

 being formed, as they originally were, by some slow unob- 

 trusive union between traders and their sons or assistants 

 we now have joint-stock-companies resulting by sudden 

 metamorphoses of groups of citizens. The like is true with 

 larger and more complex social agencies. A new town in 

 the United States arises not at all after the old method of 

 gradual accumulations round a nucleus, and successive small 

 modifications of structure accompanying increase of size ; 

 but it grows up over a large area, according to a pre-deter- 

 mined plan ; and there are developed at the outset, those 

 various civil, ecclesiastical, and industrial centres, which the 

 incipient city will require. Even in the formation of 

 colonies we may similarly see, that the whole type of social 

 organization proper to the race from which the colony comes, 

 begins at once to show itself. There is not a gradual passing 

 through all those developmental phases passed through by 

 the mother- society ; but there is a comparatively direct 

 transformation of the assemblage of colonists, into a social 

 organism allied in structure to the social organism of which 

 was an offset. 



