Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/613

Rh carry on wars with adjacent nobles and with one another. They not uncommonly form leagues for joint defense. And, where this semi-militancy of towns is maintained, industrial development and accompanying increase of popular power are arrested.

But, where circumstances have favored manufacturing and commercial activities and growth of the population devoted to them, this, as it becomes a large component of the society, makes its influence felt. The primary obligation to render money and service to the head of the state, often reluctantly complied with, is resisted when the exactions are great; and resistance causes conciliatory measures. There comes asking consent rather than resort to compulsion. If absence of violent local antagonisms permits, then on occasions when the political head, rousing anger by injustice, is also weakened by defections, there comes cooperation with other classes of oppressed subjects. Men originally delegated simply that they may authorize imposed burdens are enabled, as the power behind them increases, more and more firmly to insist on conditions; and the growing practice of yielding to their petitions, as a means to obtaining their aid, initiates the practice of letting them share in legislation.

Finally, in virtue of the general law of organization that difference of functions entails differentiation and division of the parts performing them, there comes a separation. At first summoned to the national assembly for purposes partially like and partially unlike those of its other members, the elected members show a segregating tendency, which, where the industrial portion of the community continues to gain power, ends in the formation of a representative body distinct from the original consultative body.



REVENTION is better than cure and far cheaper," said John Locke, two hundred years ago; and the history of medical science has since made it more and more probable that, in a stricter sense of the word, prevention is the only possible cure. By observing the health laws of Nature, a sound constitution can be very easily preserved, but, if a violation of those laws has brought on a disease, all we can do by way of "curing" that disease is to remove the cause; in other words, to prevent it the continued operation of the predisposing circumstances. 