Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/17

This page has been validated.
THE INDUSTRIAL TYPE OF SOCIETY.
7

are arbitrarily apportioned, while duties are arbitrarily enforced, so throughout the rest of the militant society, the superior dictates the labor and assigns such share of the return as he pleases. But as, with declining militancy and growing industrialism, the power and range of authority decrease and uncontrolled action increases, the relation of contract becomes general, and in the fully-developed industrial type it becomes universal.

Under this universal relation of contract when equitably administered, there arises that adjustment of benefit to effort which the arrangements of the industrial society have to achieve. If each as producer, distributor, manager, adviser, teacher, or aider of other kind, obtains from his fellows such payment for his service as its value, determined by the demand, warrants, then there results that correct apportioning of reward to merit which insures the prosperity of the superior.

Again changing the point of view, we see that, whereas public control in the militant type is both positively regulative and negatively regulative, in the industrial type it is negatively regulative only. To the slave, to the soldier, or to other member of a community organized for war, authority says: "Thou shalt do this; thou shalt not do that." But, to the member of the industrial community, authority gives only one of these orders, "Thou shalt not do that."

For people who, carrying on their private transactions by voluntary coöperation, also voluntarily coöperate to form and support a governmental agency, are, by implication, people who authorize it to impose on their respective activities only those restraints which they are all interested in maintaining—the restraints which check aggressions. Omitting criminals (who under the assumed conditions must be, if not a vanishing quantity, still very few), each citizen, while not wishing to invade others' spheres of action, will wish to preserve uninvaded his own sphere of action, and to retain whatever benefits are achieved within it. The very motive which prompts all to unite in upholding a public protector of their individualities will also prompt them to unite in preventing any interference with their individualities beyond that required for this end.

Hence it follows that, while, in the militant type, regimentation in the army is paralleled by centralized administration throughout the society at large, in the industrial type, administration, becoming decentralized, is at the same time narrowed in its range. Nearly all public organizations save that for administering justice, necessarily disappear; since they have the common character that they either aggress on the citizen by dictating his actions, or by taking from him more property than is needful for protecting him, or by both. Those who are forced to send their children to this or that school, those who have, directly or indirectly, to help in supporting a state-priesthood,