256 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



there may be between their divisions, are over-ridden by 

 sympathy when any one division has its existence or privi 

 leges endangered ; since the interference with one division 

 may spread to others. Moreover, they all stand in similar 

 relations to the rest of the community, whose actions are in 

 one way or other superintended by them ; and hence are led 

 into allied beliefs respecting the need for such superin 

 tendence and the propriety of submitting to it. No matter 

 what their previous political opinions may have been, men 

 cannot become public agents of any kind without being 

 &quot;biassed towards opinions congruous with their functions. So 

 that, inevitably, each further growth of the instrumentalities 

 which control, or administer, or inspect, or in any way direct 

 social forces, increases the impediment to future modifica 

 tions, both positively by strengthening that which has to be 

 modified, and negatively, by weakening the remainder ; until 

 at length the rigidity becomes so great that change is impos 

 sible and the type becomes fixed. 



Nor does each further development of political organization 

 increase the obstacles to change, only by increasing the 

 power of the regulators and decreasing the power of the 

 regulated. For the ideas and sentiments of a community as 

 a whole, adapt themselves to the regime familiar from child 

 hood, in such wise that it comes to be looked upon as natural. 

 In proportion as public agencies occupy a larger space in 

 daily experience, leaving but a smaller space for other 

 agencies, there comes a greater tendency to think of public 

 control as everywhere needful, and a less ability to conceive 

 of activities as otherwise controlled. At the same time the 

 sentiments, adjusted by habit to the regulative machinery, 

 become enlisted on its behalf, and adverse to the thought of 

 a vacancy to be made by its absence. In brief, the general 

 law that the social organism and its units act and re-act until 

 congruity is reached, implies that every further extension of 

 political organization increases the obstacle to re-organiza 

 tion, not only by adding to the strength of the regulative 



