Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/341

Rh into two streams going in contrary directions, each pursuing its particular course without the slightest resistance from the other, and to the manifest advantage, both in amount of energy expended and speed of movement, of every individual concerned.

The history of social and industrial ascent is, throughout, a record of the lessening of the resistance encountered in the attainment of human ends, as well as of the constant improvement of those ends. Social ascent not only diminishes resistance within the tribe, community, or nation; it everywhere lessens external aggression, substitutes mutual aid for the antagonisms of conflict, and enables men to devote energy spent in war to the pursuits of peace. Step by step with this lessening of resistance by the reduction of conflict, there goes on within the social body, and between the group of social bodies, those cooperative movements which, by tending to unify men, gradually bring to the aid of the individual the whole power of the social organism. In the beginning there is little industrial co-operation: each man is his own agriculturist, hunter, tailor, shoemaker, and soldier—each, that is to say, discharges for himself the work which individual maintenance involves. But little by little men discover the superior ease of mutual aid, and as they learn the value of the division of labor, the function of maintenance, originally exercised almost wholly by each individual for himself, comes more and more to be distributed among sets of individuals specially differentiated for the tasks allotted to them, and finally there arise those wider interdependencies of industrial and commercial co-operation that bind the inhabitants of almost every clime under the sun in bonds of mutual indebtedness. That the whole of this movement is a movement of constantly increasing economy of energy in the reaching of special ends, and of constant ascent in the scope and perfection of those ends, will be evident when we remember that the lower we go down in the scale of human existence—to the stages where coacting is least developed—the more rudely and imperfectly are the ends of maintenance reached, and the more completely is the time of the organism exhausted in attaining them, while the higher we look in co-operation the more efficiently are those ends accomplished, and the less time is taken up in their performance.

The way in which labor is reduced and end perfected, both as to the quality of the work and the time in which it is performed, has been shown in many familiar examples of co-operative acting. The advantages of giving particular tasks to specialized sets of workmen in such processes as those of coining and pin-making is well known. The gradual improvement of tools—which are really means to the attainment of the ends of the individual and of the community of individuals, and must therefore share in the