730 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



into the hands of wire-pullers ; that its doings would turn upon 

 the contests of office-seekers ; that political action would be every- 

 where vitiated by the intrusiou of a foreign element holding the 

 balance between parties ; that electors, instead of judging for 

 themselves, would habitually be led to the polls in thousands by 

 their " bosses " ; and that respectable men would be driven out of 

 public life by the insults and slanders of professional politicians. 

 Nor were there better previsions in those who gave constitutions 

 to the various other states of the New "World, in which un- 

 numbered revolutions have shown with wonderful persistence the 

 contrasts between the expected results of political systems and 

 the achieved results. It has been no less thus with proposed 

 systems of social re-organization, so far as they have been tried. 

 Save where celibacy has been insisted on, their history has been 

 everywhere one of disaster; ending with the history of Cabet's 

 Icarian colony lately given by one of its members, Madame Fleury 

 Robinson, in The Open Court a history of splittings, re-split- 

 tings, re-re-splittings, accompanied by numerous individual seces- 

 sions and final dissolution. And for the failure of such social 

 schemes, as for the failure of the political schemes, there has been 

 one general cause. 



' Metamorphosis is the universal law, exemplified throughout 

 the Heavens and on the Earth : especially throughout the organic 

 world ; and above all in the animal division of it. No creature, 

 save the simplest and most minute, commences its existence in a 

 form like that which it eventually assumes ; and in most cases the 

 unlikeness is great so great that kinship between the first and 

 the last forms would be incredible were it not daily demonstrated 

 in every poultry -yard and every garden. More than this is true. 

 The changes of form are often several: each of them being an 

 apparently complete transformation egg, larva, pupa, imago, for 

 example. And this universal metamorphosis, displayed alike in 

 the development of a planet and of every seed which germinates 

 on its surface, holds also of societies, whether taken as wholes or 

 in their separate institutions. No one of them ends as it begins ; 

 and the difference between its original structure and its ultimate 

 structure is such that, at the outset, change of the one into the 

 other would have seemed incredible. In the rudest tribe the chief, 

 obeyed as leader in war, loses his distinctive position when the 

 fighting is over ; and even where continued warfare has produced 

 permanent chieftainship, the chief, building his own hut, getting 

 his own food, making his own implements, differs from others 

 only by his predominant influence. There is no sign that in 

 course of time, by conquests and unions of tribes, and consolida- 

 tions of clusters so formed with other such clusters, until a nation 

 has been produced, there will originate from the primitive chief, 



