Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/708

 The proof of the necessity of building such organs is not to be derived in part only, as in the above case, but in other cases entirely ex contrario. The enormous expenditure of time and means required for progressive measures by the civic machinery in the United States is charged by Bryce to the fact that public opinion has to accomplish everything, while there is no such guiding authority as the ministries are in Europe. Neither in Congress nor in the legislatures of the several states are there administrative officers with ministerial authority, whose special duty and life task it would be to take the initiative upon untried ground, to unify legislative consideration by introducing guiding ideas, to bear responsibility for maintenance and progress of the whole—in short, to do what only individuals as such can do, and which, as this example shows, cannot be supplied by the mass action of the primary group element—here in the form of “public” opinion.

All these factors combine to expose a society without differentiated organs not merely to the disintegrating and destructive forces which every social structure develops in itself, but also to powerful individual forces, in confronting which such a society is defenseless. In the very case to which we attached this discussion, the old German confederate constitution, this condition was fatal. It was not strong enough to oppose those masterful rulers who appeared during and after the Middle Ages in the provincial and central principalities. It collapsed because it lacked what only organs constituted by individual powers can assure to a state—quickness of decision, unconditional concentration of all resources, and that highest intellectuality which is developed only by individuals, whether because their motive is love of power or the sense of responsibility.

On the other hand, the persistence of the group depends on the fact that the organ thus differentiated does not attain absolute independence. Rather must the idea remain ever operative (although by no means always conscious) that the organ is in fact only a corporealized abstraction of the reciprocal action within the group itself. The group remains always the