Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/170

158 its growth. While each increment of growth is aided by an appropriate organization, yet this organization, being inappropriate to a greater mass, becomes thereafter an impediment to further growth. Whence it follows that organization in excess of need prevents the attainment of that larger size and accompanying higher organization which might else have arisen.

To aid our interpretations of the special facts presently to be dealt with, we must keep in mind the foregoing general facts. They may be summed up as follows:

Coöperation is made possible by society, and makes society possible. It presupposes associated men, and men remain associated because of the benefits association yields them.

But there can not be concerted actions without agencies by which actions are in some way adjusted in their times, amounts, and kinds; and the actions can not be of various kinds without the coöperators undertaking different duties. That is to say, the coöperators must fall into some kind of organization, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

The organization which cooperation implies is of two kinds, distinct in origin and nature. The one, arising directly from the pursuit of individual ends and indirectly conducing to social welfare, develops unconsciously and is non-coercive. The other, arising directly from the pursuit of social ends and indirectly conducing to individual welfare, develops consciously and is coercive.

While, by making cooperation possible, political organization achieves benefits, deductions from the benefits are entailed by such organization. Maintenance of it is costly; and the cost may become a greater evil than the evils escaped. It necessarily imposes restraints; and these restraints may become so extreme that anarchy, with all its miseries, is preferable.

Organization as it becomes established is an obstacle to reorganization. Both by the inertia of position, and by the cohesion gradually established among them, the units of the structures formed oppose change. Self-sustentation is the primary aim of each part as of the whole; and hence parts once formed tend to continue, whether they are or are not useful. Moreover, each addition to the regulative structures implying, other things equal, a simultaneous deduction from the remainder of the society which is regulated, it results that, while the obstacles to change are increased, the forces causing change are decreased.

Maintenance of a society's organization implies that the units forming its component structures shall severally be replaced as they die. Stability is favored if the vacancies they leave are filled without dispute by descendants; while change is favored if the vacancies are filled by those who are experimentally proved to be best fitted for them.