392 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



individuals as to produce concerted social action ade- 

 quate to attain these more remote, less tangible ends. 



The success attendant upon these larger cooperative 

 enterprises, whatever the aims and agents may be, 

 depends on the fulfilment, to and by the constituents, 

 of definite rights and obligations in a definite sequence; 

 and this aid must be conveyed over wider areas and 

 longer periods, the larger and more comprehensive the 

 enterprises are. But these rights and obligations can 

 never be fulfilled in due time and equal measure, be- 

 cause social demands are never equally vocalized, nor 

 immediate necessities equally manifest, nor the ways 

 and means to execute them equally available to all. 



Hence the cooperative egoism and altruism of social 

 life, like the metabolism of protoplasmic life, can never 

 attain to cooperative equilibrium, for the receipt of 

 rights by one constituent cannot precede the fulfilment 

 of obligations by the others; moreover the inevitable 

 handicaps of time, and place, and capacity may out- 

 weigh the necessity for one, or obviate the performance 

 of the other. 



The rate at which cooperative social life actually 

 is evolved depends on the extent to which the under- 

 lying growth-pressure, or the increase in population 

 and the increasing exigencies of supply and demand, 

 forces these divergent tendencies through common 

 channels to their natural issues. 



This growth pressure, which is itself evidence of an 

 underlying accumulation of profits whose only outlet 

 is through the discovery, or invention, of better ways 

 and means of conveyance, compels men to seek out and 

 utilize these better ways; preserves and strengthens 

 them with increased returns when these ways are 



