Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/539

Rh systems in which they appear, and to be associated, in the act of separation, according as they are likes to each other. From whatever causes the unlikenesses which differentiate men from each other take their rise, it is manifest that even in the most minute of them the law of likes and unlikes finds illustration. Perhaps the most common and familiar example of this simultaneous association and dissociation is afforded by the breaking up of a social gathering into minor groups of likes that do not easily coalesce. In all such cases the individuals who so naturally fall into pairs or groups move from associations that involve the greatest resistance into associations that involve the least resistance, while the movement itself (given the need of association) is manifestly the product of the stress of the greater resistance.

In what multifarious ways this stress is exerted may be easily shown. As a small group of men surrounded in battle by a larger force naturally come together and are compacted for defense by the stress of those who attack, so the individual members of classes or races despised, hated, or feared, when persecuted by the community in which they live, are in like manner thrust and welded together by the stress which they encounter. Individuals, again, who differ from their fellows to the extent of being unable or unwilling to work—to take part in those co-operative activities that are necessary for individual as well as social maintenance—meet with the resistances which failure in self-maintenance involves, and are by them, though nominally by society, thrust into hospitals or poor-houses; while men whose actions are unlike those of others beyond the amount of difference permitted by law are dissociated, either by exile or imprisonment, from the communities which they injure. When expulsion of the unlikes is not practicable, there is association of them as prisoners within the system. Savages, again, often abandon or destroy individuals deformed at birth or incapacitated from social duties by age; even a comparatively advanced people like the Spartans exposed their weaklings to death by starvation. That there is still a tendency to offer undue resistance to the unlikenesses of physical and mental deformity is shown by the treatment of lunatics and criminals even in the most civilized countries; not many years ago positively cruel, it is still in many cases culpably careless and inadequate. The treatment ordinarily given by human beings to the lower animals; offenses against the helplessness of children and women; the oppression of individuals by autocrats, by governments, by official tyrants abusing power intrusted to them by the people, and by capitalists taking unfair advantage of the economic condition of those whom they employ—these are all cases of stress directed against unlikes. So shortcomings of men of every kind veritable unlikenesses are in numberless ways