Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/14

4 the welfare of his offspring are fully achieved by each, the welfare of the society is by implication achieved. Very little corporate activity is now required. Each man may maintain himself by labor, may exchange his products for the products of others, may give aid and receive payment, may enter into this or that combination for carrying on an undertaking, small or great, without the direction of the society as a whole. The remaining end to be achieved by public action is to keep private actions within due bounds; and the amount of public action needed for this becomes small in proportion as private actions become duly self-bounded.

So that, whereas in the militant type the demand for corporate action is intrinsic, such demand for corporate action as continues in the industrial type is mainly extrinsic—is called for by those aggressive traits of human nature which chronic warfare has fostered, and may gradually diminish as, under enduring peaceful life, these decrease.

In a society organized for militant action, the individuality of each member has to be so subordinated in life, liberty, and property, that he is largely, or completely, owned by the state; but, in a society industrially organized, no such subordination of the individual is called for. There remain no occasions on which he is required to risk his life while destroying the lives of others; he is not forced to leave his occupation and submit to a commanding officer; and there ceases to be any need that he should surrender for public purposes whatever property may be demanded of him.

Under the industrial régime, the citizen's individuality, instead of being sacrificed by the society, has to be defended by the society: the defense of his individuality becomes the society's essential duty. That, after external protection is no longer called for, internal protection must become the cardinal function of the state, and that effectual discharge of this function must be a predominant trait of the industrial type, may be readily shown.

For it is clear that, other things equal, a society in which life, liberty, and property, are secure, and all interests justly regarded, must prosper more than one in which they are not; and consequently, among competing industrial societies, there must be a gradual replacing of those in which personal rights are imperfectly maintained by those in which they are perfectly maintained. So that by survival of the fittest must be produced a social type in which individual claims, considered sacred, are trenched on by the state no further than is requisite to pay the cost of maintaining them, or, rather, of arbitrating among them. For, the aggressiveness of nature fostered by militancy having died out, the corporate function becomes that of deciding between those conflicting claims the equitable adjustment of which is not obvious to the persons concerned.