Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/755

Rh accepted; and the ever-multiplying bodies espousing these beliefs, instead of being governed despotically, govern themselves after a manner more or less representative. Military conformity, coercively maintained, gives place to a varied non-conformity maintained by willing union.

The industrial organization itself, which thus, as it becomes predominant, affects all the rest, of course shows us in an especial degree this change of structure. From the primitive predatory condition, under which the master maintains slaves to work for him, there is a transition through stages of increasing freedom to a condition like our own, in which all who work and employ, buy and sell, are entirely independent; and in which there is an unchecked power of forming associations that rule themselves on democratic principles. Combinations of workmen, and counter-combinations of employers, no less than political societies and leagues for carrying on this or that agitation, show us the representative mode of government; which characterizes also every joint-stock company for mining, banking, railway-making, or other commercial enterprise. Further, we see that, as in the predatory type the military mode of regulation ramifies into all minor departments of social activity, so here does the industrial mode of regulation. Multitudinous objects are achieved by spontaneously-evolved combinations of citizens governed representatively. The tendency to this kind of organization is so ingrained that, for every proposed end, the proposed means is a society ruled by an elected committee headed by an elected chairman—philanthropic associations of multitudinous kinds, literary institutions, libraries, clubs, bodies for fostering the various sciences and arts, etc., etc.

Along with all which traits there go sentiments and ideas concerning the relation between the citizen and the state, opposite to those accompanying the predatory type. In place of the doctrine that the duty of obedience to the governing agent is unqualified, there arises the doctrine that the will of the citizens is supreme, and the governing agent exists merely to carry out their will. Thus subordinated in authority, the regulating power is also restricted in range. Instead of having an authority extending over actions of all kinds, it is shut out from large classes of actions. Its control over ways of living in respect to food, clothing, amusements, is repudiated; it is not allowed to dictate modes of production, nor to regulate trade. Nor is this all. It becomes a duty to resist irresponsible government, and also to resist the excesses of responsible government. There arises a tendency in minorities to disobey even the legislature deputed by the majority, when it interferes in certain ways; and their oppositions to laws they condemn as inequitable from time to time cause abolition of them. With which changes of political theory and accompanying-sentiment is joined a belief, implied or avowed, that the combined actions of the social aggregate have for their end to maintain the