Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/786

766 ," and in some cases exercise over "civilians" an inspection of a military kind; as instance the chief of the Birmingham police, Major Bond, whose subalterns track home men who are unsteady from drink but quiet, and prosecute them next morning; or as instance the regulation by policemen's commands of the conflicting streams of vehicles in the London streets. To an increasing extent the executive has been overriding the other governmental agencies; as in the Cyprus business, and as in the doings of the Indian Viceroy under secret instructions from home. In various minor ways are shown endeavors to free officialism from popular checks; as in the desire expressed in the House of Lords that the hanging of convicts in prisons, intrusted entirely to the authorities, should have no other witnesses; and as in the advice given by the late Home Secretary (on May 11, 1878) to the Derby town council, that it should not interfere with the chief constable (a military man) in his government of the force under him—a step toward centralizing local police control in the home office. Simultaneously we see various actual or prospective extensions of public agency, replacing or restraining private agency. There is the "endowment of research," which, already partially carried out by a government fund, many wish to carry further; there is the proposed act for establishing a registration of authorized teachers; there is the bill which provides central inspection for local public libraries; there is the scheme for compulsory insurance—a scheme showing us in an instructive manner the way in which the regulating policy extends itself: compulsory charity having generated improvidence, there comes compulsory insurance as a remedy for the improvidence. Other proclivities toward institutions belonging to the militant type are seen in the increasing demand for some form of protection, and in the lamentations uttered by the "society papers" that dueling has gone out. Nay, even through the party which by position and function is antagonistic to militancy, we see that militant discipline is spreading; for the caucus-system, established for the better organization of liberalism, is one which necessarily, in a greater or less degree, centralizes authority and controls individual action.

Besides seeing, then, that the traits to be inferred a priori as characterizing the militant type constantly exist in societies which are permanently militant in high degrees, we also see that in other societies increase of militant activity is followed by development of such traits.

In some places I have stated, and in other places implied, that a necessary relation exists between the structure of a society and the natures of its citizens. Here it will be well to observe in detail the characters proper to, and habitually exemplified by, the members of a typically militant society.

Other things equal, a society will be successful in war in