Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/613

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 599

nationalism and internationalism, of the organic theory, which is also the theory of the only mediative social contract. The third determining point of the theory's circumference, namely, industrialism, remains to be considered, and in this the media- tion of the social contract is to be seen as peculiarly between man and nature, although personal and national unity and inter- national unity are hardly less clearly manifest in it. Indeed, that industrialism means internationalism is one of the common- places of the day, and that it depends on personal and national competition, on personal and national individuality, is also very generally recognized ; but with peculiar significance the rise of industrialism has involved the appeal, which we have found really to underlie the contract theory, from the human to the natural. Man has appealed to nature in order to escape from himself, from the tyranny of his own nature, from despotism and militarism, believing, as was said above, that in a known law of nature he had more assurance of freedom than in any whim of his own, and in industrialism, so constantly dependent on machinery, on the mechanical application of natural resources to human ends, the appeal has been brought to earth, exemplified and progressively satisfied. Nor is machinery the only evidence of industrial man's resort to nature. In the growing demand for popular education a demand that has required ever more and more modern language and natural science and technical train- ing for the curricula of the schools ; in the growth of religious freedom ; in the recognition of social responsibility for crime ; in the idea of property as not treasure but power, and of the right to property as springing from use, not from mere possession ; in denial of the privilege of inheritance of acquired station or acquired wealth ; in the increased means of all kinds of exchange and transportation; and, finally to mention something already referred to in another relation in the increasing emphasis on the purely advisory and formulative character of legislation ; in all these different ways, more or less directly associated with the passage out of militarism into industrialism, an appeal to nature is manifest ; and from them, as so many additional premises, one must conclude the unity of man and nature, so essential to the