 inflow of proposals for the prompt reorganization of society on a new basis. In fact our new command over nature, while opening the door to much larger schemes for industrial organization than were physically possible even a short time ago, places greater responsibilities on those who would advocate new developments of social and industrial structure. For though institutions may be changed rapidly; yet if they are to endure they must be appropriate to man: they cannot retain their stability if they change very much faster than he does. Thus progress itself increases the urgency of the warning that in the economic world, Natura non facit saltum. (6)
Progress must be slow; but even from the merely material point of view it is to be remembered that changes, which add only a little to the immediate efficiency of production, may be worth having if they make mankind ready and fit for an organization, which will be more effective in the production of wealth and more equal in its distribution; and that every system, which allows the higher faculties of the lower grades of industry to go to waste, is open to grave suspicion.
1. See a brilliant paper by Häckel on Arbeitsteilung in Menschen- und Tierleben and Schäffle's Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers.
2. Like all other doctrines of the same class, this requires to be interpreted in the light of the fact that the effective demand of a purchaser depends on his means, as well as on his wants: a small want on the part of a rich man often has more effective force in controlling the business arrangements of the world than a great want on the part of a poor man.
3. See above I, IV, section 6; and below Appendix B, sections 3 and 6.
4. Man with his many motives, as he may set himself deliberately to encourage the growth of one peculiarity, may equally set himself to check the growth of another: the slowness of progress during the Middle Ages was partly due to a deliberate detestation of learning.
5. See Note XI in the Mathematical Appendix. Considerations of this class have little application to the development of mere animals, such as mice; and none at all to that of peas and other vegetables. And therefore the marvellous arithmetical results which have been established, provisionally at all events, in regard to heredity in such cases, have very little bearing on the full problems of inheritance with which students of social science are concerned: and some negative utterances on this subject by eminent Mendelians seem to lack due reserve. Excellent remarks on the subject will be found in Prof Pigou's Wealth and Warfare, Part I, ch. IV.
6. Compare Appendix A, section 16.
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