Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/158

148 way furthered it, save by partially discharging their proper function and maintaining social order. So, too, with those advances of knowledge and those improvements of appliances by which these structural changes and these increasing activities have been made possible. It is not to the state that we owe the multitudinous useful inventions from the plow to the telephone; it is not the state which made possible extended navigation by a developed astronomy; it is not the state which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry, and the rest, which guide modern manufacturers; it is not the state which devised the machinery for producing fabrics of every kind, for transferring men and things from place to place, and for ministering in a thousand ways to our comforts. The world-wide transactions going on in merchants' offices, the rush of traffic filling our streets, the retail distributing system which brings everything within easy reach and delivers the necessaries of life daily at our doors, are not of governmental origin. All these are the results of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate or combined. Nay, to these spontaneous activities governments owe the very means of performing their duties. Divest the political machinery of all those aids which science and art have yielded it—leave it with those only which state-officials have invented—and its functions would cease. The very language in which its laws are registered and the orders of its agents daily given is an instrument not in the remotest degree due to the legislator, but is one which has unawares grown up during men's intercourse while pursuing their personal satisfactions.

And then a truth, to which the foregoing one introduces us, is that this spontaneously-formed social organization is so bound together that you can not act on one part without acting more or less on all parts. We see this unmistakably when a cotton-famine, first paralyzing certain manufacturing districts and then affecting the doings of wholesale and retail distributors throughout the kingdom, as well as the people they supply, goes on to affect the makers and distributors, as well as the wearers, of other fabrics—woolen, linen, etc. Or we see it when a rise in the price of coal, besides influencing domestic life everywhere, hinders the greater part of our industries, raises the prices of the commodities produced, alters the consumption of them, and changes the habits of consumers. What we see clearly in these marked cases happens in every case in sensible or in insensible ways. And, manifestly, acts of Parliament are among those factors which, beyond the effects directly produced, have countless other effects of multitudinous kinds. As I heard remarked by a distinguished professor, whose studies give ample means of judging, "When once you begin to interfere with the order of Nature there is no knowing where the results will end." And, if this is true of that sub-human order of Nature to which he referred, still more is it true of that order of Nature existing in the social arrangements produced by aggregated human beings.