Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/44

40 luckless hysterical actor in all the vulgar farces and horrible tragedies of historical life.

Great empires, becoming gradually bureaucratized, institutionalized, differentiated, and ossified, carry within them the germs of decay and death. The growth of nations has, until the present time, been associated with a predominance of rigid structure over living function. When such lines and forms of organic development prevail, the individual, as the cell of the body, becomes soon senescent, drifting inevitably into age, decay, and death. The great biologist and embryologist, Professor Minot, describes this downward course of organic evolution, as the Law of Genetic Restriction: "The development runs in one direction, and ends in the production of structure, which, if it is pursued to its legitimate terminus, results in degeneration and death." Societies, developing on lines of organic growth, follow the Law of Genetic Restriction. The individual unit is more and more restricted to the narrow lines of growth of differentiation and specialization in which the individual is sacrificed to society and the state, and generally to the progressive development of the social organism, as the phrase runs. Such societies, from the very nature of the course taken by their evolution, tend towards decay, death, and final dissolution. Just as the process of cytmorophosiscytomorphosis [sic], or cell development, in the evolution of the organism leads to an increase of cytoplasm with formation of rigid connective tissue and fibre, with a corresponding decrease of nucleoplasm, the ever living font of life and youth, the process ending in dissolution of both the cell and the organism, so the process undergone by the individual in social organic evolution by a gradual reduction of the living personality and predominance of the subconscious with its rigid Byzantine institutionalism and formalism results in destruction of individuality, corruption, and dissolution of society.

With the increase of social pressure on the individual, with the ever rising power of restriction of freedom of thought and expression, and loss of liberty of manifestation of originality and initiative due to an ever greater amount of legislation and regulation of the minutiae of individual life, true social progress diminishes, comes to a standstill, ending in decline, decay, and ruin. Society is doomed to an ignominous death as soon as the connective tissue of institutions and the ossified material of officialdom with its rank growth of unyielding red tape and formalism begin to spread, choking, and strangling the free, personal life of the individual. The ancient Assyrian,