THE PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMY IN EVOLUTION. 329 



tion into two streams going in contrary directions, each pursuing 

 its particular course without the slightest resistance from the 

 other, and to the manifest advantage, both in amount of energy 

 expended and speed of movement, of every individual concerned. 



The history of social and industrial ascent is, throughout, a 

 record of the lessening of the resistance encountered in the attain- 

 ment of human ends, as well as of the constant improvement of 

 those ends. Social ascent not only diminishes resistance within 

 the tribe, community, or nation ; it everywhere lessens external 

 aggression, substitutes mutual aid for the antagonisms of con- 

 flict, and enables men to devote energy spent in war to the pur- 

 suits of peace. Step by step with this lessening of resistance by 

 the reduction of conflict, there goes on within the social body, 

 and between the group of social bodies, those co-operative move- 

 ments which, by tending to unify men, gradually bring to the aid 

 of the individual the whole power of the social organism. In the 

 beginning there is little industrial co-operation : each man is his 

 own agriculturist, hunter, tailor, shoemaker, and soldier each, 

 that is to say, discharges for himself the work which individual 

 maintenance involves. But little by little men discover the 

 superior ease of mutual aid, and as they learn the value of the 

 division of labor, the function of maintenance, originally exer- 

 cised almost wholly by each individual for himself, comes more 

 and more to be distributed among sets of individuals specially 

 differentiated for the tasks allotted to them, and finally there 

 arise those wider interdependencies of industrial and commer- 

 cial co-operation that bind the inhabitants of almost every clime 

 under the sun in bonds of mutual indebtedness. That the whole 

 of this movement is a movement of constantly increasing economy 

 of energy in the reaching of special ends, and of constant ascent 

 in the scope and perfection of those ends, will be evident when 

 we remember that the lower we go down in the scale of human 

 existence to the stages where coacting is least developed the 

 more rudely and imperfectly are the ends of maintenance reached, 

 and the more completely is the time of the organism exhausted 

 in attaining them, while the higher we look in co-operation the 

 more efficiently are those ends accomplished, and the less time is 

 taken up in their performance. 



The way in which labor is reduced and end perfected, both as 

 to the quality of the work and the time in which it is performed, 

 has been shown in many familiar examples of co-operative acting. 

 The advantages of giving particular tasks to specialized sets of 

 workmen in such processes as those of coining and pin-making is 

 well known. The gradual improvement of tools which are really 

 means to the attainment of the ends of the individual and of the 

 community of individuals, and must therefore share in the move- 



