Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/662

644 the nature which we inherit from an uncivilized past, and which is still very imperfectly fitted to the partially civilized present, will, if allowed to do so, slowly adjust itself to the requirements of a fully civilized future. And a further implication is that the various faculties, tastes, abilities, gradually established, will have for their concomitants the satisfactions felt in discharging the various duties social life entails. Already there has been gained a considerable amount of the needful capacity for work, which savages have not; already the power of orderly co-operation under voluntary agreement has been developed; already such amounts of self-restraints have been acquired that most men carry on their lives without much impeding one another; already the altruistic interests felt by citizens in social affairs at large, are such as prompt efforts, individual and spontaneously combined, to achieve public ends; and already men's sympathies have become active enough to generate multitudinous philanthropic agencies—too multitudinous in fact. And if, in the course of these few thousand years, the discipline of social life has done so much, it is folly to suppose that it can not do more—folly to suppose that it will not in course of time do all that has to be done.

A further truth remains. It is impossible for artificial molding to do that which natural molding does. For the very essence of the process as spontaneously carried on, is that each faculty acquires fitness for its function by performing its function; and if its function is performed for it by a substituted agency, none of the required adjustment of nature takes place; but the nature becomes deformed to fit the artificial arrangements instead of the natural arrangements. More than this: it has to be depleted and dwarfed, for the support of the substituted agencies. Not only does there result the incapable nature, the distorted nature, and the nature which misses the gratifications of desired achievement; but that the superintending instrumentalities may be sustained, the sustentation of those who are superintended is diminished: their lives are undermined and their adaptation in another way impeded.

Again, then, let me emphasize the fundamental distinction. While war is the business of life, the entailed compulsory co-operation implies molding of the units by the aggregate to serve its purposes; but when there comes to predominate the voluntary co-operation characterizing industrialism, the molding has to be spontaneously achieved by self-adjustment to the life of voluntary co-operation. The adjustment can not possibly be otherwise produced.

And now we come round again at last to the general principle enunciated at first. All reasons for going counter to the primary law of social life prove invalid; and there is no safety but in conformity to that law.