Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/160

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148
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

on directive and restraining functions for public ends. It is true, as already hinted, and as we shall see presently, that the two kinds are mingled in various ways—that each ramifies through the other more or less according to their respective degrees of predominance. But the two are essentially different in origin and nature; and for the present we must, so far as may be, limit our attention to the last.

That the coöperation into which men have gradually risen secures to them benefits which could not be secured while, in their primitive state, they acted singly, and that, as an indispensable means to this cooperation, political organization has been, and is, advantageous, we shall see on contrasting the states of men who are not politically organized with the states of men who are politically organized in less or greater degrees.

There are, indeed, conditions under which as good an individual life is possible without political organization as with it. Where, as in the habitat of the Esquimaux, there are but few persons, and these very widely scattered; where there is no war, probably because the physical impediments to it are great and the motives to it feeble; and where circumstances make the occupations so uniform that there is little scope for the division of labor—mutual dependence can have no place, and the arrangements which effect it are not needed. Recognizing this exceptional case, let us consider the cases which are not exceptional.

The Digger Indians, "very few degrees removed from the orangoutang," who, scattered among the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, sheltering in holes and living on roots and vermin, "drag out a miserable existence in a state of nature, amid the most loathsome and disgusting squalor," differ from the other divisions of the Shoshones by their entire lack of social organization. The river-haunting and plain haunting divisions of the race, under some, though but slight, governmental control, lead more satisfactory lives. In South America the Chaco Indians, low in type as are the Diggers, and like them degraded and wretched in their lives, are similarly contrasted with the superior and more comfortable savages around them in being dissociated. Among the Bedouin tribes, the Sherarat are unlike the rest in being divided and subdivided into countless bands which have no common chief; and they are described as being the most miserable of the Bedouins. More decided still is the contrast noted by Baker between certain adjacent African peoples. Passing suddenly, he says, from the unclothed, ungoverned tribes—from the "wildest savagedom to semi-civilization"—we come in Unyoro to a country governed by "an unflinching despot," inflicting "death or torture" for "the most trivial offenses"; but where they have developed administration, sub-governors, taxes, good clothing, arts, agriculture, architecture. So, too, concerning New Zealand when first discovered. Cook remarks that there seemed to