396 THE SOCIAL OKGAinSM. 



cised alike the functions of landowner, farmer, soldier, 

 statesman, judge. Retainers were now soldiers, and now 

 labourers, as the day required. But by degrees the 

 Church has lost all civil jurisdiction ; the State has exer- 

 cised less and less control over religious teaching ; the mil- 

 itary class has grown a distinct one ; handicrafts have con- 

 centrated in towns ; and the spinning-wheels of scattered 

 farmhouses, have disappeared before the machinery of man- 

 ufacturing districts. Not only is all progress from the ho- 

 mogeneous to the heterogeneous ; but at the same time it 

 is from the indefinite to the definite. 



Another fact which should not be passed over, is that in 

 the evolution of a large society out of an aggregation of small 

 ones, there is a gradual obliteration of the original Hues of 

 separation — a change to which, also, we may see analogies 

 in living bodies. Throughout the sub-kingdom A?i7itflosa, 

 this is clearly and variously illustrated. Among the lower 

 types of this sub-kingdom, the body consists of numerous 

 segments that are alike in nearly every particular. Each 

 has its external ring ; its pair of legs, if the creature has 

 legs ; its equal portion of intestines, or else its separate 

 stomach ; its equal portion of the great blood-vessel, or, in 

 some cases, its separate heart ; its equal portion of the ner- 

 vous cord, and, perhaps, its separate pair of ganglia. But 

 in the highest types, as in the large Crustacea, many of 

 the segments are completely fused together ; and the internal 

 organs are no longer uniformly repeated in all the segments. 

 Now the segments of which nations at first consist, lose their 

 separate external and internal structures in a similar manner. 

 In feudal times, the minor communities governed by feudal 

 lords, were severally organized in the same rude way ; and 

 were held together only by the fealty of their respective 

 rulers to some suzerain. But along with the growth of a 

 central power, the demarcations of these local communities 

 disappeared ; and their separate organizations merged into 



