Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/751

Rh with necessaries of life, we have already seen that, during the subsequent stages of evolution, the industrial part of the society continues to be essentially a permanent commissariat, existing solely to supply the needs of the governmental-military structures, and having left over for itself only enough for bare maintenance. Hence, the development of political regulation over its activities has been in fact the extension throughout it of that military rule which, as a permanent commissariat, it naturally had. An extreme instance is furnished us by the ancient Peruvians, whose political and industrial governments were identical—whose kinds and quantities of labor, for every class in every locality, were prescribed by laws enforced by state officers—who had work legally dictated even for their young children, their blind, and their lame, and who were publicly chastised for idleness; regimental discipline being applied to industry just as our modern advocate of strong government would have it now. The late Japanese system, completely military in origin and nature, similarly permeated industry; great and small things—houses, ships, down even to mats—were prescribed in their structures. In the warlike monarchy of Madagascar, the artisan classes are all in the employ of government, and no man can change his occupation or locality, under pain of death. Without multiplication of cases, these typical ones, reminding the reader of the extent to which, even in modern fighting states, industrial activities are officially regulated, will sufficiently show the principle.

Not industry only, but life at large, is, in militant societies, subject to kindred discipline. Before its recent collapse, the government of Japan enforced sumptuary laws on each class, mercantile and other, up to the provincial governors, who must rise, dine, go out, give audience, and retire to rest at prescribed hours; and the native literature specifies regulations of a scarcely credible minuteness. In ancient Peru, officers "minutely inspected the houses, to see that the man, as well as his wife, kept the household in proper order, and preserved a due state of discipline among their children;" and householders were rewarded or chastised accordingly. Among the Egyptians each person had, at fixed intervals, to report to a local officer his name, abode, and mode of living. Sparta, too, yields an example of a society specially organized for offense and defense, in which the private conduct of citizens, in all its details, was under public control enforced by spies and censors. Though regulations so stringent have not characterized the militant type in more recent ages, yet we need but recall the laws regulating food and dress, the restraints on locomotion, the prohibitions of some games and dictation of others, to indicate the parallelism of principle. Even now, where the military organization has been kept in vigor by military activities, as in France, we are shown, by the peremptory control of journals and suppression of meetings, by the regimental uniformity of education,