Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/165

Rh furnished an illustration of this tendency. Down to the present time we have before us the familiar instance of trade guilds in London, which, having ceased to perform their original functions, nevertheless jealously maintain themselves for no purpose but the gratification of their members. And the accounts given in "The Black-book," of the sinecures which survived up to recent times, yield multitudinous illustrations.

The extent to which an organization resists reorganization we shall not fully appreciate until we observe that its resistance increases in a compound progression. For, while each new part is an additional obstacle to change, the formation of it implies a deduction from the forces causing change. If, other things remaining the same, the political structures of a society are further developed—if the existing institutions are extended or fresh ones set up—if, for directing social activities in greater detail, extra staffs of officials are appointed, the simultaneous results are an increase in the aggregate of those who form the regulating part and a corresponding decrease in the aggregate of those who form the part regulated. In various ways all who compose the controlling and administrative organization become united with one another and separated from the rest. Whatever be their particular duties, they are similarly related to the minor and major governing centers of their departments, and, through them, to the supreme governing center; and are habituated to like sentiments and ideas respecting the set of institutions in which they are incorporated. Receiving their subsistence through the national revenue, they tend toward kindred views and feelings respecting the raising of such revenue. Whatever jealousies there may be between their divisions, are overridden by sympathy when any one division has its existence or privileges endangered, since the interference with one division may spread to others. Moreover, they all stand in like relations to the rest of the community, whose actions are in one way or other superintended by them; and hence are led into kindred views respecting the need for such superintendence and the propriety of submitting to it. No matter what their previous political opinions may have been, they can not become public agents of any kind without being biased toward 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 modifications, 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 impossible and the type becomes fixed.

Nor does each further development of the regulative organization increase the obstacles to change only by relatively increasing the power of those who, as regulators, maintain the established order, and decreasing the power of those who, as the regulated, have not the same