Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/316

302 coherent under some common control. And so it is subsequently with still larger aggregates.

Progress in social integration is both a cause and a consequence of a decreasing separableness among the units. Primitive wandering hordes exercise no such restraints over their members as prevent them individually from leaving one horde and joining another at will. Where tribes are more developed, desertion of one and admission into another are less easy—the assemblages are not so loose in composition. And, throughout those long stages during which societies are being enlarged and consolidated by militancy, the mobility of the units is more and more restrained. Only with that substitution of voluntary coöperation for compulsory coöperation which characterizes developing industrialism do these restraints disappear: enforced union being in such societies adequately replaced by spontaneous union.

A remaining truth to be named is that political integration, as it advances, tends to obliterate the original divisions among the united parts. In the first place, there is the slow disappearance of those nontopographical divisions arising from relationship, and resulting in separate gentes and tribes, gentile and tribal divisions, which are for a long time maintained after larger societies have been formed: gradual intermingling destroys them. In the second place, the smaller local societies united into a larger one, which at first retain their separate organizations, lose them by long coöperation: a common organization begins to ramify through them, and their individualities become indistinct. And, in the third place, there simultaneously results a more or less decided obliteration of their topographical bounds, and a replacing of these by the new administrative bound of the common organization. Hence naturally results the converse truth that, in the course of social dissolution, the great groups separate first, and afterward, if dissolution continues, these separate into their component smaller groups. Instance the ancient empires successively formed in the East, the united kingdoms of which severally resumed their autonomies when the coercion keeping them together ceased. Instance, again, the Carlovingian empire, which, first parting into its large divisions, became in course of time further disintegrated by subdivision of these. And where, as in this last case, the process of dissolution goes very far, there is a return to something like the primitive condition, under which small predatory societies are engaged in continuous warfare with like small societies around them.