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 170 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

course of time the surviving group becomes larger and larger, and its machinery of organization more and more inexorable and despotic. This is necessary for the sake of survival. Social institutions are not picnics or fishing clubs. If they were, they would quickly fall apart. They are organized for struggle, survival, and supremacy. There is iron in them. They are based on the coercive sanctions intrinsic in private property, which is the social expression of self-consciousness and the origin of social institutions. Herein social organization is fundamentally different from physical or biological organization.

These sanctions, radiating from one man, give, on the one hand, unity, power, and survival to the social organization, and, on the other hand, increased scope and freedom to the mere wishes, choices, commands, and personal character of the auto- crat. In the long run centralization may bring happiness to the subordinates, which seems to be the main justification of organi- zation in the eyes of Spencer and Ward ; but whether it does so or not is a matter of secondary importance. Survival first, happiness afterward. The latter can receive no attention what- ever until the period of conflict has passed and coercive organiza- tion has achieved unquestioned supremacy. Those individuals and classes who reverse this order and seek happiness first are both immoral and increasingly extinct. Abraham's polygamy was justifiable because necessary, Brigham Young's was immoral because only utilitarian.

3. The coercion exercised by the monarch is not absolute and unlimited, but is conditioned by the character, circumstances, and stage of civilization of his subjects. He represents the organized coercion of society, but coercion is only one of the controlling social relations. Equally important are love, rever- ence, hunger, inertia, custom, and multitudes of petty local and private quests. As long as his coercion does not infringe too far upon the daily lives of his people, and they are secured in a measure of their customary beliefs and enjoyments, their entire strength, otherwise unorganized, is vouchsafed to him and appears in his hands as the coercive sanctions and the subordina- tion of individuals to his wishes.