254 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



difficulty, that building with new materials becomes more 

 economical than rebuilding with the old. 



I name these facts to illustrate the truth that any arrange 

 ment stands in the way of re-arrangement; and that this 

 must be true of organization, which is one kind of arrange 

 ment. When, during the evolution of a living body, its com 

 ponent substance, at first relatively homogeneous, has been 

 transformed into a combination of heterogeneous parts, there 

 results an obstacle, always great and often insuperable, to 

 any considerable further change : the more elaborate and defi 

 nite the structure the greater being the resistance it opposes 

 to alteration. And this, which is conspicuously true of an 

 individual organism, is true, if less conspicuously, of a social 

 organism. Though a society, formed of discrete units, and 

 not having had its type fixed by inheritance from countless 

 like societies, is much more plastic, yet the same principle 

 holds. As fast as its parts are differentiated as fast as there 

 arise classes, bodies of functionaries, established administra 

 tions, these, becoming coherent within themselves and with 

 one another, struggle against such forces as tend to modify 

 them. The conservatism of every long-settled institution 

 daily exemplifies this law. Be it in the antagonism of a 

 church to legislation interfering with its discipline ; be it in 

 the opposition of an army to abolition of the purchase- 

 Bystem ; be it in the disfavour with which the legal profes 

 sion at large has regarded law-reform ; we see that neither in 

 their structures nor in their modes of action, are parts that 

 have once been specialized easily changed. 



As it is true of a living body that its various acts have as 

 their common end self- preservation, so is it true of its com 

 ponent organs that they severally tend to preserve them 

 selves in their integrity. And, similarly, as it is true of a 

 society that maintenance of its existence is the aim of its 

 combined actions, so it is true of its separate classes, its sets 

 of officials, its other specialized parts, that the dominant aim 

 of each is to maintain itself. Not the function to be per* 



