IMITATION AMONG ATOMS AND ORGANISMS. 501 



expression over a mncli wider field, and finally gives character to 

 the whole social system. All rules governing the activities of 

 large or small bodies of men, such as regulations in factories, 

 hospitals and prisons, by-laws in cities, and general laws framed 

 for communities and nations, are manifestly means of providing 

 against unequal acting of individuals of securing, that is to say, 

 the like acting, under particular and specified circumstances, of 

 all the individuals associated. The sense, early developed, in the 

 individuals of a community that they ought to be equal before 

 the law, with the restiveness which they manifest under all in- 

 equalities of its operation ; the claim that men shall be politically 

 as well as legally equal ; and the demand always made, if not 

 always satisfied, for universal suffrage, first for men, and then for 

 women at first with limitations of race, property, or sex, and 

 finally without such limitations all these explain the progress 

 which the world has been making during the last fifty years 

 toward an ideal democracy toward a condition of ideal political 

 equality between the units that make up a human society as the 

 very condition and means of least resistance between those units. 



But men do not remain satisfied with likenesses set up by 

 statute law, with resemblances imposed by a governing body. 

 They aim, more or less consciously, more or less outspokenly, at 

 a common degree of social well-being for all the individuals of 

 a community, and, rightly or wrongly, regard inequalities of 

 wealth, even inequalities of industrial power, as imperfect stages 

 of human development that are to be outgrown. Hence it is that 

 men denounce monopolies, and declare abnormally large accumu- 

 lations of wealth in private hands to be iniquitous, because inequi- 

 tous ; hence, too, it is that, in the common jealousy of privilege* 

 there is to be found every form of hostility to exceptional social 

 power and rank, from the dislike in which it is merely envied to 

 the anger by which it is openly attacked. Socialistic schemes 

 of reform are really schemes for diminishing those inequalities 

 which still offer resistance to the association of men schemes* 

 that is to say, for making men in social, political, and legal rela- 

 tions, in powers, privileges, and responsibilities more than ever 

 before likes to each other. Even religions illustrate the progress 

 from a belief and acquiescence in special privileges held out to a 

 favored few to an expectation and demand for the salvation of 

 all ; for if the pagan had to content himself with the satisfaction 

 of knowing death as the universal leveler, asking with Cicero 

 (Tusculan Disputations) "Can what is necessary for all be a 

 source of misery to one ? " the Christian, who claims the equality 

 of all men before God, looks forward to a life hereafter in which 

 all earthly unlikenesses are to be removed. 



We shall next note that when unlikes are forced to remain 



