Though mere love of companionship prompts primitive men to live in groups, yet the chief prompter is experience of the advantages to be derived from co-operation. On what condition only can co-operation arise? Evidently on condition that those who join their efforts severally gain by doing so. If, as in the simplest cases, they unite to achieve something which each by himself can not achieve, or can achieve less readily, it must be on the tacit understanding, either that they shall share the benefit (as when game is caught by a party of them) or that if one reaps all the benefit now (as in building a hut or clearing a plot) the others shall severally reap equivalent benefits in their turns. When instead of efforts joined in doing the same thing different things are effected by them—when division of labor arises, with accompanying barter of products, the arrangement implies that each in return for something which he has in superfluous quantity, gets an approximate equivalent of something which he wants. If he hands over the one and does not get the other, future proposals to exchange will meet with no response. There will be a reversion to that rudest condition in which each makes everything for himself. Hence the possibility of co-operation depends on fulfillment of contract, tacit or overt.
Now this which we see must hold of the very first step toward that industrial organization by which the life of a society is maintained, must hold more or less fully throughout its development. Though the militant type of organization, with its system of status produced by chronic war, greatly obscures these relations of contract, yet they remain partially in force. They still hold between freemen, and between the heads of those small groups, which form the units of early societies; and in a measure they still hold within these small groups themselves; since survival of them as groups, implies such recognition of the claims of their members, even when slaves, that in return for their labors they get sufficiencies of food, clothing, and protection. And when, with diminution of warfare and growth of trade, voluntary co-operation more and more replaces compulsory co-operation, and the carrying on of social life by exchange under agreement, partially suspended for a time, gradually re-establishes itself; its re-establishment brings the possibility of that vast elaborate industrial organization by which a great nation is sustained.
For in proportion as contracts are unhindered and the performance of them certain, the growth is great and the social life active. It is not now by one or other of two individuals who contract, that the evil effects of breach of contract are experienced. In an advanced society, they are experienced by entire classes of producers and distributors which have arisen through division of labor; and eventually they are experienced by everybody. Ask on what condition it is that Birmingham devotes itself to manufacturing hardware, or part of Staffordshire to making pottery, or Lancashire to weaving cotton? Ask how the
