Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/756

728 conditions under which individual lives may be satisfactorily carried on; in place of the old belief that individual lives have for their end the maintenance of this aggregate's combined actions.

These pervading traits, in which the industrial type differs so widely from the predatory type, originate in those relations of individuals implied by industrial activities, which are wholly unlike those implied by predatory activities. All trading transactions, whether between masters and workmen, buyers and sellers of commodities, or professional men and those they aid, are effected by free exchange. For some benefit which A's occupation enables him to give, B willingly yields up an equivalent benefit; if not in the form of something he has produced, then in the form of money gained by his occupation. This relation, in which the mutual rendering of services is unforced and neither individual subordinated, becomes the predominant relation throughout society, in proportion as the industrial activities predominate. Daily determining the thoughts and sentiments, daily disciplining all in asserting their own claims, while forcing them to recognize the correlative claims of others, it produces social units whose mental structures and habits mould social arrangements into corresponding forms. There results this type characterized throughout by that same individual freedom which every commercial transaction implies. The coöperation by which the multiform activities of the societies are carried on, becomes a voluntary cooperation. And while the developed sustaining system, which gives to a social organism the industrial type, acquires for itself, like the developed sustaining system of an animal, a regulating apparatus of a diffused or uncentralized kind, it tends also to decentralize the primary regulating apparatus, by making it derive from more numerous classes its deputed powers.

Necessarily the essential traits of these two social types are in most cases obscured, both by the antecedents and by the coexisting circumstances. Every society has been, at each past period, and is at present, conditioned in a way more or less unlike the ways in which others have been and are conditioned. Hence, the production of structures, characterizing one or other of these opposed types, is, in every instance, furthered, or hindered, or modified, in a special manner. Observe the several kinds of causes.

There is, first, the deeply-organized character of the particular race, coming down from those prehistoric times during which the diffusion of mankind, and differentiation of the varieties of man, took place. Very difficult to change, this must in every case qualify differently the tendency toward assumption of either type.

There is, next, the effect due to the immediately preceding mode of life and social type. Nearly always the society we have to study contains decayed institutions and habits belonging to an ancestral