Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/19

Rh follow when men, not bound to prescribed functions, acquire the functions for which they have proved themselves most fit. Easily modified in its arrangements, the industrial type of society is therefore one which adapts itself with facility to new requirements.

The other incidental result to be named is a tendency toward loss of economic autonomy.

While hostile relations with adjacent societies continue, each society has to be productively self-sufficing; but with the establishment of peaceful relations this need for self-sufficingness ceases. As the local divisions composing one of our great nations had, while they were at feud, to produce each for itself almost everything it required, but now, permanently at peace with one another, have become so far mutually dependent that no one of them can satisfy its wants without aid from the rest, so the great nations themselves, at present forced in large measure to maintain their economic autonomies, will become less forced to do this as war decreases, and will gradually become necessary to one another. While, on the one hand, the facilities possessed by each for certain kinds of production will render exchange mutually advantageous, on the other hand, the citizens of each will, under the industrial régime, tolerate no such restraints on their individualities as are implied by interdicts on exchange.

With the spread of the industrial type, therefore, the tendency is toward the breaking down of the divisions between nationalities, and the running through them of a common organization—if not under a single government, then under a federation of governments.

Such being the constitution of the industrial type of society to be inferred from its requirements, we have now to inquire what evidence is furnished by actual societies that approach toward this constitution accompanies the progress of industrialism.

As, during the peopling of the earth, the struggle for existence among societies, from small hordes up to great nations, has been nearly everywhere going on, it is, as before said, not to be expected that we should readily find examples of the social type appropriate to an exclusively industrial life. Ancient records join the journals of the day in proving that thus far no civilized or semi-civilized nation has fallen into circumstances making needless all social structures for resisting aggression, and from every region travelers' accounts bring evidence that, almost universally among the uncivilized, hostilities between tribes are chronic. Still, a few examples exist which show with tolerable clearness the outline of the industrial type in its rudimentary form—the form which it assumes where culture has made but little progress. We will consider these cases first, and then proceed to disentangle the traits distinctive of the industrial type as exhibited by large nations which have become predominantly industrial in their activities.