Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/12

2 is done. Where the society is small, and its habitat so favorable that life may be comfortably maintained with but little exertion, the social relations which characterize the industrial type may coexist with but very moderate productive activities. It is not the diligence of its members which constitutes the society an industrial one in the sense here intended, but the form of coöperation under which their labors, small or great in amount, are carried on. This distinction will be best understood on observing that, conversely, there may be, and often is, great industry in societies framed on the militant type. In ancient Egypt there was an immense laboring population, and a large supply of commodities, numerous in their kinds, produced by it. Still more did ancient Peru exhibit a vast community purely militant in its structure, the members of which worked unceasingly. We are here concerned, then, not with the quantity of labor, but with the arrangements under which it is carried on. A regiment of soldiers can be set to construct earthworks; another to cut down wood; another to bring in water; but they are not thereby reduced for the time being to an industrial society. The united individuals, doing these several things under command, and having no private claims to the products, are, though industriously occupied, not industrially organized. And the same holds throughout the militant society as a whole, in proportion as the regimentation of it approaches completeness.

The industrial type of society, properly so called, must also be distinguished from a type very likely to be confounded with it—the type, namely, in which the component individuals, while exclusively engaged in production and distribution, are under a regulation such as that advocated by socialists and communists. For this, too, involves, in another form, the principle of compulsory coöperation. Directly or indirectly, individuals are to be prevented from severally and independently occupying themselves as they please; are to be prevented from competing with one another in supplying goods for money; are to be prevented from hiring themselves out on such terms as they think fit. There can be no artificial system for regulating labor which does not interfere with the natural system. To such extent as men are debarred from making whatever engagements they like, they are to that extent working under dictation. No matter in what way the controlling agency is constituted, it stands toward those controlled in the same relation as does the controlling agency of a militant society. And how truly the régime, which those who declaim against competition would establish, is thus characterized, we see both in the fact that substantially communistic forms of organization existed in early societies which were predominantly warlike, and in the fact that at the present time communistic projects chiefly originate among, and are must favored by, the more warlike societies.

A further preliminary explanation may be needful. The structures proper to the industrial type of society must not be looked for in