148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



way furthered it, save by partially discharging their proper function 

 and maintaining social order. So, too, with those advances of knowl- 

 edge and those improvements of appliances by which these structural 

 changes and these increasing activities have been made possible. It 

 is not to the state that we owe the multitudinous useful inventions 

 from the plow to the telephone ; it is not the state which made possi- 

 ble extended navigation by a developed astronomy ; it is not the state 

 which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry, and the rest, which 

 guide modern manufacturers ; it is not the state which devised the 

 machinery for producing fabrics of every kind, for transferring men 

 and things from place to place, and for ministering in a thousand ways 

 to our comforts. The world-wide transactions going on in merchants' 

 offices, the rush of traffic filling our streets, the retail distributing sys- 

 tem which brings everything within easy reach and delivers the neces- 

 saries of life daily at our doors, are not of governmental origin. All 

 these are the results of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate 

 or combined. Nay, to these spontaneous activities governments owe 

 the very means of performing their duties. Divest the political ma- 

 chinery of all those aids which science and art have yielded it — Cleave 

 it with those only which state-officials have invented — and its func- 

 tions would cease. The very language in which its laws are registered 

 and the orders of its agents daily given is an instrument not in the 

 remotest degree due to the legislator, but is one which has unawares 

 grown up during men's intercourse while pursuing their personal satis- 

 factions. 



And then a truth, to which the foregoing one introduces us, is that 

 this spontaneously-formed social organization is so bound together that 

 you can not act on one part without acting more or less on all parts. 

 We see this unmistakably when a cotton-famine, first paralyzing cer- 

 tain manufacturing districts and then affecting the doings of whole- 

 sale and retail distributors throughout the kingdom, as well as the 

 people they supply, goes on to affect the makers and distributors, as 

 well as the wearers, of other fabrics — woolen, linen, etc. Or we see it 

 when a rise in the price of coal, besides influencing domestic life every- 

 where, hinders the greater part of our industries, raises the prices of 

 the commodities produced, alters the consumption of them, and changes 

 the habits of consumers. What we see clearly in these marked cases 

 happens in every case in sensible or in insensible ways. And, manifest- 

 ly, acts of Parliament are among those factors which, beyond the ef- 

 fects directly produced, have countless other effects of multitudinous 

 kinds. As I heard remarked by a distinguished professor, whose stud- 

 ies give ample means of judging, " When once you begin to interfere 

 with the order of Nature there is no knowing where the results will 

 end." And, if this is true of that sub-human order of Nature to which 

 he referred, still more is it true of that order of Nature existing in the 

 social arrangements produced by aggregated human beings. 



