POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN GENERAL. 259 



clan or house, official, or any person having the power given 

 by rank or property, retains his place until at death it is filled 

 by a descendant, in conformity with some accepted rule of 

 succession, is a system under which, by implication, the 

 young, and even the middle-aged, are excluded from the con 

 duct of affairs. So, too, where an industrial system is such 

 that the son, habitually brought up to his father s business, 

 cannot hold a master s position till his father dies, it follows 

 that the regulative power of the elder over the processes of 

 production and distribution, is scarcely at all qualified by the 

 power of the younger. Now it is a truth daily exemplified, 

 that increasing rigidity of organization, necessitated by the 

 process of evolution, produces in age an increasing strength 

 of habit and aversion to change. Hence it results that suc 

 cession to place and function by inheritance, having as its 

 necessary concomitant a monopoly of power by the eldest, 

 involves a prevailing conservatism ; and thus further insures 

 maintenance of things as they are. 



Conversely, social change is facile in proportion as men s 

 places and functions are determinable by personal qualities. 

 Members of one rank who establish themselves in another 

 rank, in so far directly break the division between the ranks ; 

 and they indirectly weaken it by preserving their family 

 relations with the first, and forming new ones with the 

 second ; while, further, the ideas and sentiments pervading 

 the two ranks, previously more or less different, are made 

 to qualify one another and to work changes of character. 

 Similarly if, between sub-divisions of the producing and dis 

 tributing classes, there are no barriers to migration, then, in 

 proportion as migrations are numerous, influences physical 

 and mental, following inter-fusion, alter the natures of their 

 units ; at the same time that they check fche establishment of 

 differences of nature caused by differences of occupation. 

 Such transpositions of individuala between class and class, or 

 group and group, must, on the average, however, depend oil 

 the fitnesses of the individuals for their new places and duties. 



