644 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the nature which we inherit from an uncivilized past, and which 

 is still very imperfectly fitted to the partially civilized present, 

 will, if allowed to do so, slowly adjust itself to the requirements 

 of a fully civilized future. And a further implication is that the 

 various faculties, tastes, abilities, gradually established, will have 

 for their concomitants the satisfactions felt in discharging the 

 various duties social life entails. Already there has been gained 

 a considerable amount of the needful capacity for work, which 

 savages have not ; already the power of orderly co-operation under 

 voluntary agreement has been developed ; already such amounts 

 of self-restraints have been acquired that most men carry on 

 their lives without much impeding one another ; already the al- 

 truistic interests felt by citizens in social affairs at large, are such 

 as prompt efforts, individual and spontaneously combined, to 

 achieve public ends ; and already men's sympathies have become 

 active enough to generate multitudinous philanthropic agencies 

 too multitudinous in fact. And if, in the course of these few 

 thousand years, the discipline of social life has done so much, it 

 is folly to suppose that it can not do more folly to suppose that 

 it will not in course of time do all that has to be done. 



A further truth remains. It is impossible for artificial mold- 

 ing to do that which natural molding does. For the very essence 

 of the process as spontaneously carried on, is that each faculty 

 acquires fitness for its function by performing its function ; and 

 if its function is performed for it by a substituted agency, none of 

 the required adjustment of nature takes place ; but the nature 

 becomes deformed to fit the artificial arrangements instead of the 

 natural arrangements. More than this : it has to be depleted and 

 dwarfed, for the support of the substituted agencies. Not only does 

 there result the incapable nature, the distorted nature, and the 

 nature which misses the gratifications of desired achievement ; but 

 that the superintending instrumentalities may be sustained, the 

 sustentation of those who are superintended is diminished : their 

 lives are undermined and their adaptation in another way impeded. 



Again, then, let me emphasize the fundamental distinction. 

 While war is the business of life, the entailed compulsory co-op- 

 eration implies molding of the units by the aggregate to serve its 

 purposes ; but when there comes to predominate the voluntary 

 co-operation characterizing industrialism, the molding has to be 

 spontaneously achieved by self -adjustment to the life of voluntary 

 co-operation. The adjustment can not possibly be otherwise pro- 

 duced. 



And now we come round again at last to the general principle 

 enunciated at first. All reasons for going counter to the primary 

 law of social life prove invalid ; and there is no safety but in con- 

 formity to that law. 



