3o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Though mere love of companionship prompts primitive men to live 

 in groups, yet the chief prompter is experience of the advantages to 

 be derived from co-operation. On what condition only can co-opera- 

 tion arise ? Evidently on condition that those who join their efforts 

 severally gain by doing so. If, as in the simplest cases, they unite to 

 achieve something which each by himself can not achieve, or can 

 achieve less readily, it must be on the tacit understanding, either that 

 they shall share the benefit (as when game is caught by a party of 

 them) or that if one reaps all the benefit now (as in building a hut 

 or clearing a plot) the others shall severally reap equivalent benefits 

 in their turns. When instead of efforts joined in doing the same 

 thing different things are effected by them — when division of labor 

 arises, with accompanying barter of products, the arrangement im- 

 plies that each in return for something which he has in superfluous 

 quantity, gets an approximate equivalent of something which he wants. 

 If he hands over the one and does not get the other, future proposals 

 to exchange will meet with no response. There will be a reversion 

 to that rudest condition in which each makes everything for himself. 

 Hence the possibility of co-operation depends on fulfillment of con- 

 tract, tacit or overt. 



Now this which we see must hold of the very first step toward that 

 industrial organization by which the life of a society is maintained, 

 must hold more or less fully throughout its development. Though the 

 militant type of organization, with its system of status produced by 

 chronic war, greatly obscures these relations of contract, yet they re- 

 main partially in force. They still hold between freemen, and between 

 the heads of those small groups, which form the units of early societies ; 

 and in a measure they still hold within these small groups themselves ; 

 since survival of them as groups, implies such recognition of the claims 

 of their members, even when slaves, that in return for their labors 

 they get sufliciencies of food, clothing, and protection. And when, 

 with diminution of warfare and growth of trade, voluntary co-opera- 

 tion more and more replaces compulsory co-operation, and the carry- 

 ing on of social life by exchange under agreement, partially suspended 

 for a time, gradually re-establishes itself ; its re-establishment brings 

 the possibility of that vast elaborate industrial organization by which 

 a great nation is sustained. 



For in proportion as contracts are unhindered and the performance 

 of them certain, the growth is great and the social life active. It is 

 not now by one or other of two individuals who contract, that the evil 

 effects of breach of contract are experienced. In an advanced society, 

 they are experienced by entire classes of producers and distributors 

 which have arisen through division of labor ; and eventually they are 

 experienced by everybody. Ask on what condition it is that Birming- 

 ham devotes itself to manufacturing hardware, or part of Staffordshire 

 to making pottery, or Lancashire to weaving cotton ? Ask how the 



