158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



on the business of law-making with the greatest hesitation. Yet in 

 this more than in anything else do they show a confident readiness. 

 Kowhere is there so astounding a contrast between the difficulty of the 

 task and the unpreparedness of those who undertake it. Surely among 

 monstrous beliefs one of the most monstrous is that, while for a mean 

 handicraft, such as shoe -making, a long apprenticeship is needful, 

 the sole thing which needs no apprenticeship is making a nation's 

 laws! 



Summing up the results of the discussion, may we not reasonably 

 say that there lie before the legislator several open secrets, which yet 

 are so open that they ought not to remain secrets to one who under- 

 takes the vast and terrible responsibility of dealing with millions upon 

 millions of human beings by measures which, if they do not conduce 

 to their happiness, will increase their miseries and accelerate their 

 deaths ? 



There is first of all the undeniable truth, conspicuous and yet abso- 

 lutely ignored, that there are no phenomena which a society presents 

 but what have their origins in the phenomena of individual human 

 life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large. And 

 there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, 

 bodily and mental, are chaotic in their relations (a supposition excluded 

 by the very maintenance of life) the resulting phenomena can not be 

 wholly chaotic : there must be some kind of order in the phenomena 

 which grow out of them when associated human beings have to co- 

 operate. Evidently, then, when one who has not studied such resulting 

 phenomena of social order undertakes to regulate society he is pretty 

 certain to work mischiefs. 



In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this conclusion 

 should be forced on the legislator by comparisons of societies. It ought 

 to be sufficiently manifest that, before meddling wdth the details of 

 social organization, inquiry should be made whether social organiza- 

 tion has a natural history ; and that, to answer this inquiry, it would 

 be well, setting out with the simplest societies, to see in what respects 

 social structures agree. Such comparative sociology, pursued to a very 

 small extent, shows a substantial uniformity of genesis. The habitual 

 existence of chieftainship, and the establishment of chiefly authority 

 by war ; the rise everywhere of the medicine-man and priest ; the 

 presence of a cult having in all places the same fundamental traits ; 

 the traces of division of labor, early displayed, which gradually be- 

 come more marked ; and the various complications, political, ecclesi- 

 astical, industrial, which arise as groups are compounded and recom- 

 pounded by war — quickly prove to any who compares them that, apart 

 from all their special differences, societies have general resemblances 

 in their modes of origin and development. They present traits of 

 structure showing that social organization has laws which override 



