Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/157

Rh ; so that a climate is wholesome to the adapted race which is fatal to other races. No one denies that peoples who belong to the same original stock but have spread into different habitats where they have led different lives have acquired in course of time different aptitudes and different tendencies. No one denies that under new conditions new national characters are even now being molded, as witness the Americans. And if no one denies a process of adaptation everywhere and always going on, it is a manifest implication that adaptive modifications must be set up by every change of social conditions.

To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men's modes of action—compelling, or restraining, or aiding, in new ways—so affects them as to cause in course of time an adjusted nature. Beyond any immediate effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most—a remolding of the average character: a remolding which may be of a desirable or an undesirable kind, but which in any case is the most important of the results to be considered.

Other general truths, which the citizen, and still more the legislator, ought to contemplate until they become wrought into his intellectual fabric, are disclosed when we ask how social activities are produced; and when we recognize the obvious answer that they are the aggregate results of the desires of individuals who are severally seeking satisfactions, and ordinarily pursuing the ways which, with their preexisting habits and thoughts, seem the easiest—following the lines of least resistance: the truths of political economy being so many sequences. It needs no proving that social structures and social actions must in some way or other be the outcome of human emotions guided by ideas—either those of ancestors or those of living men. And that the right interpretation of social phenomena is to be found in the cooperation of these factors from generation to generation follows inevitably.

Such an interpretation soon brings us to the inference that, of the aggregate results of men's desires seeking their gratifications, those which have prompted their private activities and their spontaneous co-operations have done much more toward social development than those which have operated through governmental agencies. That abundant crops now grow where once only wild berries could be gathered is due to the pursuit of individual satisfactions through many centuries. The progress from wigwams to good houses has resulted from wishes to increase personal welfare; and towns have arisen under the like promptings. Beginning with peddlers and with traffic at meetings on occasions of religious festivals, the trading organization, now so extensive and complex, has been produced entirely by men's efforts to achieve their private ends. Perpetually governments have thwarted and deranged the growth, but have in no