374 THE SOCIAL OBGAJSriSM. 



While each citizen has been pursuing his individual wel 

 fare, and none taking thought about division of labour, or, 

 indeed, conscious of the need for it, division of labour has 

 yet been ever becoming more complete. It has been doing 

 this slowly and silently : scarcely any having observed it 

 until quite modern times. By stej)s so small, that year 

 after year the industrial arrangements have seemed to men 

 just what they were before — by changes as insensible as 

 those through which a seed passes into a tree ; society has 

 become the complex body of mutually-dependent workers 

 which we now see. And this economic organization, mark, 

 is the all-essential organization. Through the combination 

 thus spontaneously evolved, every citizen is supplied with 

 daily necessaries ; while he yields some product or aid to 

 others. . That we are severally alive to-day, we owe to the 

 regular working of this combination during the past week; 

 and could it be suddenly abolished, a great proportion of 

 us would be dead before another week ended. If these 

 most conspicuous and vital arrangements of our social 

 structure, have arisen without the devising of any one, but 

 through the individual efforts of citizens to satisfy their 

 own wants ; we may be tolerably certain that the less im- 

 portant arrangements have similarly arisen. 



" But surely," it will be said, " the social changes di- 

 rectly produced by law, cannot be classed as spontaneous 

 growths. When parliaments or kings order this or that 

 thing to be done, and appoint officials to do it, the process 

 is clearly artificial ; and society to this extent becomes a 

 manufacture rather than a growth.'' No, not even these 

 changes are exceptions, if they be real and permanent 

 changes. The true sources of such changes lie deeper 

 than the acts of legislators. To take first the simj)lest 

 instance. We all know that the enactments of represent- 

 ative governments ultimately depend on the national 

 will: they may for a time be out of harmony with it, but 



