Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/37

Rh of pirate captains, suffused with admiration of their courage, no longer find a place in our literature; and the sneaking kindness for "gentlemen of the road" is, in our days, but rarely displayed. Many as are the transgressions which our journals report, they have greatly diminished; and, though in trading transactions there is much dishonesty (chiefly of the indirect sort), it needs but to read De Foe's "English Tradesman" to see how marked has been the improvement since his time. Nor must we forget that the change of character which has brought a decrease of unjust actions has brought an increase of beneficent actions; as seen in paying for slave emancipation, in nursing the wounded soldiers of our fighting neighbors, in philanthropic efforts of countless kinds.

As with the militant type, then, so with the industrial type, three lines of evidence converge to show us its essential nature. Let us set down briefly the several results, that we may observe the correspondences among them.

On considering what must be the traits of a society organized exclusively for carrying on internal activities, so as most efficiently to subserve the lives of citizens, we find them to be these: A corporate action, subordinating individual actions by uniting them in joint effort, is no longer requisite. Contrariwise, such corporate action as remains has for its end to guard individual actions against all interferences not necessarily entailed by mutual limitation: the type of society in which this function is best discharged being that which must survive, since it is that of which the members will most prosper. Excluding, as the requirements of the industrial type do, a despotic controlling agency, they imply, as the only congruous agency for achieving such corporate action as is needed, one formed of representatives who serve to express the aggregate will. The function of this controlling agency, generally defined as that of administering justice, is more specially defined as that of seeing that each citizen gains neither more nor less of benefit than his activities normally bring; and there is thus excluded all public action involving any artificial distribution of benefits. The régime of status proper to militancy having disappeared, the régime of contract which replaces it has to be universally enforced; and this negatives interferences between efforts and results by arbitrary appointment. Otherwise regarded, the industrial type is distinguished from the militant type as being not both positively regulative and negatively regulative, but as being negatively regulative only. With this restricted sphere for corporate action comes an increased sphere for individual action; and from that voluntary coöperation which is the fundamental principle of the type arise multitudinous private combinations, akin in their structures to the public combination of the society which includes them. Indirectly it results that a society of the industrial type is distinguished by plasticity; and also