TO THE POOE. 257 



structure of society, is to continue to exist or no. There 

 may be good reasons to think that the consent of men, 

 which permits the laws, will not be revoked ; still men 

 retain the right and the power to revoke their consent, if 

 their interest requires it. Men can abrogate sociological 

 laws as well as statute laws, if they find them incon- 

 venient, if they press heavily upon them, if they interfere 

 with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 

 There is no fatality about them, as about physical laws. 

 Undoubtedly, sociological laws can be changed ; and they 

 will be changed wherever they run counter to the law 

 of self-preservation the first and most imperious of 

 Nature's laws, as Darwin and Spencer rightly maintain 

 it to be. Moreover, some of the supposed laws would 

 soon disappear under the influence of a powerful new 

 sentiment, such as has given birth and life to religious 

 and social revolutions once and again. 



Thus, then, the laws of society and Science, with 

 which we are threatened, are not physical laws, that we 

 should accept their fatal necessity with resignation and 

 bowed heads. They are not universal facts to be 

 accepted and made the best of. They are alterable, all 

 of them inconsistent with men's general wishes all of 

 them which hurt, all which are not obviously implied in 

 the mere notion of men living together at all. These 

 last are not, indeed, alterable, because they are profitable, 

 because men alive to their interest will not alter them. 

 When men, naturally gregarious animals, come together, 

 they must, indeed, live under some moral laws, devised 

 under a sense of the general interest; and they must 

 soon discover and put in practice some economic ex- 

 pedients for making labour more effective, such as the 

 division of employments, and sometimes the co-operation 

 of efforts, which are also obviously prompted by a sense 



s 



