Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/15

Rh With the absence of need for that corporate action by which the efforts of the whole society may be utilized for war, there goes the absence of need for a despotic controlling agency.

Not only is such an agency unnecessary, but it can not exist. For, since, as we see, it is an essential requirement of the industrial type that the individuality of each man shall have the fullest play consistent with the like play of other men's individualities, despotic control, showing itself as it must by otherwise restricting men's individualities, is necessarily excluded. Indeed, by his mere presence an autocratic ruler is an aggressor on citizens; actually or potentially exercising power not given by them, he in so far restrains their wills more than they would be restrained by mutual limitation merely.

Such control as is required under the industrial type can be exercised only by an appointed agency for ascertaining and executing the average will; and a representative agency is the one best fitted for doing this.

Unless the activities of all are homogeneous in kind, which they can not be in a developed society with its elaborate division of labor, there arises a need for conciliation of divergent interests; and, to the end of insuring an equitable adjustment, each interest must be enabled duly to express itself. It is, indeed, supposable that the appointed agency should be a single individual. But no such single individual could arbitrate justly among numerous classes variously occupied, and numerous groups variously localized, without hearing evidence; from each there would need to come representatives setting forth its claims. Hence the choice would lie between two systems, under one of which the representatives privately and separately stated their cases to an arbitrator on whose single judgment decisions depended; and under the other of which these representatives stated their cases in one another's presence, while judgments were openly determined by the general consensus. Without insisting on the fact that a fair balancing of class-interests is more likely to be effected by this last form of representation than by the first, it is sufficient to remark that this last form is more congruous with the nature of the industrial type, since men's individualities are in the smallest degree trenched upon. Citizens, who, appointing a single ruler for a prescribed time, may have a majority of their wills traversed by his during this time, surrender their individualities in a greater degree than do those who, from their local groups, depute a number of rulers; since these, speaking and acting under public inspection and mutually restrained, habitually express the wills of the majority.

The corporate life of the society being no longer in danger, and the remaining business of government being that of maintaining the conditions requisite for the highest individual life, there comes the question, What are these conditions?