Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/752

724 by the official administration of the fine arts, the way in which its characteristic regulating system ramifies everywhere.

And then, lastly, is to be noted the theory concerning the relation between the state and the individual, with its accompanying sentiment. This structure, which adapts a society for combined action against other societies, is associated with the belief that its members exist for the benefit of the whole, and not the whole for the benefit of its members. As in an army the liberty of the soldier is denied, and only his duty as a member of the mass insisted on; as in a permanently encamped army, like the Spartan nation, the laws recognized no personal interests, but patriotic ones only; so in the militant type throughout the claims of the unit are nothing, and the claims of the aggregate everything. Absolute subjection to authority is the supreme virtue, and resistance to it a crime. Other offenses may be condoned, but disloyalty is an unpardonable offense. If we take the sentiments of the sanguinary Feejeeans, among whom loyalty is so intense that a man stands unbound to be knocked on the head, himself saying that what the king wills must be done; or those of the Dahomans, among whom the highest officials are the king's slaves, and on his decease his women sacrifice one another that they may all follow him; or those of the ancient Peruvians, among whom with a dead Inca, or great curaca, were buried alive his favorite attendants and wives that they might go to serve him in the other world; or those of the ancient Persians, among whom a father, seeing his innocent son shot by the king in pure wantonness, "felicitated" the king "on the excellence of his archery," and among whom bastinadoed subjects "declared themselves delighted because his majesty had condescended to recollect them"—we are sufficiently shown that, in this social type, the sentiment which prompts the assertion of personal rights, in opposition to the ruling power, scarcely exists.

Thus the trait characterizing the militant structure throughout is that its units are coerced into their various combined actions. As the soldier's will is so suspended that he becomes in everything the agent of his officer's will, so is the will of the citizen in all transactions, private and public, overruled by that of the government. The coöperation by which the life of the militant society is maintained, is a compulsory coöperation. The social structure adapted for dealing with surrounding hostile societies is under a centralized regulating system, to which all the parts are completely subject; just as in the individual organism the outer organs are completely subject to the chief nervous centre.

The traits of the industrial type have to be generalized from inadequate and entangled data. Antagonism, more or less constant with other societies, having been almost everywhere and always the condition of each society, a social structure fitted for offense and defense