EVOLUTION AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. 459 



boards of trade, and "by telegraphs, without which existing society 

 would instantly dissolve, are nowhere set forth. And likewise 

 the great subject of industrial disorders, their origins, progress, 

 and decline, a subject which promises so much to scientific study, 

 is not even hinted at. In a word, the conception of industrial 

 society as an organism, subject to the same laws of evolution as 

 others, and like other organisms having its structures and func- 

 tions, its changes in response to environment, its health and dis- 

 ease, is entirely absent. 



It is the province of evolution to introduce these ideas into 

 political economy ; to point out the harmony of the evolution of 

 industrial society with that of universal Nature. Evolutionary 

 political economy begins with the formation of those simple social 

 groups whose members lived by hunting and fishing, and the first 

 step in industrial life is shown to be the selection of a member 

 surpassing the rest as a maker of weapons and implements for 

 that duty. This step increases the strength of the group and 

 leads to a further increase in size. Presently, by the interaction 

 of this and other factors, the size of the group becomes such that 

 it is partly encouraged, partly forced into the pastoral and then 

 into the agricultural state. 



And, however blended and complicated with other social phe- 

 nomena industrial evolution may be, no one who has once fixed 

 his eye on the cardinal principles of evolution will fail to see how 

 strikingly they reveal themselves in economic history. As the 

 yolk slowly divides and again divides until head and limbs and 

 stomach and feathers faintly appear, and finally the chick steps 

 forth, so industrial society, impelled by an indwelling force, 

 evolves from time to time as conditions permit the organizations 

 of men necessary for the better supply of social wants, and also 

 the functions they perform and the processes by which they 

 work. 



To me the supreme lesson evolution has to offer to students of 

 political economy is the automatic and irresistible nature of the 

 process by which society evolves the functions and structures 

 needful for its betterment. No philosopher or statesman invented 

 boards of trade or foresaw their indispensable necessity as the 

 social agents for the distribution of grain throughout the world, 

 for the steadying of prices, and for the guaranty they afford of a 

 close approximation of the prices paid the producer to that paid 

 by the consumer. No economist established banks or conceived 

 the vast uses they would subserve. No human mind foresaw the 

 uses of the railroad, the steamboat, or the telegraph, nor were 

 any of these created with much thought as to such uses. Gun- 

 powder had accomplished its mission of establishing the physical 

 supremacy of intelligence before anybody understood what that 



