THE INDUSTRIAL TYPE OF SOCIETY. 27 



pliies of pirate captains, suffused with admiration of their courage, no 

 longer find a place in our literature ; and the sneaking kindness for 

 "gentlemen of the road" is, in our days, but rarely displayed. Many 

 as are the transgressions which our journals report, they have greatly 

 diminished ; and, though in trading transactions there is much dis- 

 honesty (chiefly of the indirect sort), it needs but to read De Foe's 

 " English Tradesman " to see how marked has been the improvement 

 since his time. Nor must we forget that the change of character 

 which has brought a decrease of unjust actions has brought an in- 

 crease of beneficent actions ; as seen in paying for slave emancipa- 

 tion, in nursing the wounded soldiers of our fighting neighbors, in 

 philanthropic efforts of countless kinds. 



As with the militant type, then, so with the industrial type, three 

 lines of evidence converge to show us its essential nature. Let us set 

 down briefly the several results, that we may observe the correspond- 

 ences among them. 



On considering what must be the traits of a society organized ex- 

 clusively for carrying on internal activities, so as most efficiently to 

 subserve the lives of citizens, we find them to be these : A corporate 

 action, subordinating individual actions by uniting them in joint effort, 

 is no longer requisite. Contrariwise, such corporate action as remains 

 has for its end to guard individual actions against all interferences 

 not necessarily entailed by mutual limitation : the type of society in 

 which this function is best discharged being that which must survive, 

 since it is that of which the members will most prosper. Excluding, 

 as the requirements of the industrial type do, a despotic controlling 

 agency, they imply, as the only congruous agency for achieving such 

 corporate action as is needed, one formed of representatives who serve 

 to express the aggregate will. The function of this controlling agency, 

 generally defined as that of administering justice, is more specially 

 defined as that of seeing that each citizen gains neither more nor less 

 of benefit than his activities normally bring ; and there is thus ex- 

 cluded all public action involving any artificial distribution of benefits. 

 The regime of status proper to militancy having disappeared, the 

 regime of contract which replaces it has to be universally enforced ; 

 and this negatives interferences between efforts and results by arbi- 

 trary appointment. Otherwise regarded, the industrial type is distin- 

 guished from the militant type as being not both positively regulative 

 and negatively regulative, but as being negatively regulative only. 

 With this restricted sphere for corporate action comes an increased 

 sphere for individual action ; and from that voluntary cooperation 

 which is the fundamental principle of the type arise multitudinous 

 private combinations, akin in their structures to the public combina- 

 tion of the society which includes them. Indirectly it results that a 

 society of the industrial type is distinguished by plasticity ; and also 



