These various industrial actions and reactions constitute a dependentmoving equilibrium like that maintained among the functions of an individualorganism, and like it tends ever to become more complete. During early stagesof social evolution, while the resources of the locality inhabited are unexploredand the arts of production undeveloped, there is never anything more thana temporary and partial balancing of such actions. But when a society approachesthe maturity of that type on which it is organized, the various industrialactivities settle down into a comparatively constant state. Moreover, advancein organization, as well as advance in growth, is conducive to a better equilibriumof industrial functions. While the diffusion of mercantile information isslow and the means of transport deficient, the adjustment of supply to demandis very imperfect. Great over-production of a commodity is followed by greatunder-production, and there results a rhythm having extremes that departwidely from the mean state in which demand and supply are equilibrated. Butwhen good roads are made and there is a rapid diffusion of printed or writtenintelligence, and still more when railways and telegraphs come into existence-- when the periodical fairs of early days grow into weekly markets, andthese into daily markets, there is gradually produced a better balance ofproduction and consumption: the rapid oscillations of price within narrowlimits on either side of a comparatively uniform mean, indicate a near approachto equilibrium. Evidently this industrial progress has for its limit, thatwhich Mr. Mill has called "the stationary state." When populationshall have become dense over all habitable parts of the globe; when the resourcesof every region have been fully explored; and when the productive arts admitof no further improvements; there must result an almost complete balance,both between the fertility and mortality in each society, and between itsproducing and consuming activities. Each society will exhibit only minordeviations from its average number, and the rhythm of its industrial functionswill go on from day to day and year to year with comparatively insignificantperturbations.
One other kind of social equilibration has still to be considered: --that which results in the establishment of governmental institutions, andwhich becomes complete as these institutions fall into harmony with the desiresof the people. Those aggressive impulses inherited from the pre-social state-- those tendencies to seek self-satisfaction regardless of injury to otherbeings, which are essential to a predatory life, constitute an anti-socialforce tending ever to cause conflict and separation. Contrariwise, thosedesires which can be fulfilled only by co-operation and those which findsatisfaction through intercourse with fellow-men, as well as those resultingin what we call loyalty, are forces tending to keep the units of a societytogether. On the one hand, there is in each man more or less of resistanceagainst restraints imposed on his actions by other men -- a resistance which,tending ever to widen each man's sphere of action, and reciprocally to limitthe spheres of action of other men, constitutes a repulsive force mutuallyexercised by the members of a social aggregate. On the other hand, the generalsympathy of man for man and the more special sympathy of each variety ofman for others of the same variety, together with allied feelings which thesocial state gratifies, act as an attractive force, tending ever to keepunited those who have a common ancestry. And since the resistances to beovercome in satisfying the totality of their desires when living separately,are greater than the resistances to be overcome in satisfying the totalityof their desires when living together, there is a residuary force that preventsseparation. Like other opposing forces, those exerted by citizens on oneanother produce alternating movements which, at first extreme, undergo gradualdiminution on the way to ultimate equilibrium. In small, undeveloped societies,marked rhythms result from these conflicting tendencies. A tribe that hasmaintained its unity for a generation or two, reaches a size at which itwill no longer hold together; and, on the occurrence of some event causingunusual antagonism among its members, divides. Each primitive nation exhibitswide oscillations between an extreme in which the subjects are under rigidrestraint, and an extreme in which the restraint fails to prevent rebellionand disintegration. In more advanced nations of like type, we always findviolent actions and reactions of the same essential nature: "despotismtempered by assassination," characterizing a political state in whichunbearable repression from time to time brings about a bursting of bonds.
