ogress. Association frees
mental power for expenditure in improvement, and equality, or justice,
or freedom--for the terms here signify the same thing, the recognition
of the moral law--prevents the dissipation of this power in fruitless
struggles.

Here is the law of progress, which will explain all diversities, all
advances, all halts, and retrogressions. Men tend to progress just as
they come closer together, and by co-operation with each other increase
the mental power that may be devoted to improvement; but just as
conflict is provoked, or association develops inequality of condition
and power, this tendency to progression is lessened, checked, and
finally reversed.

Given the same innate capacity, and it is evident that social
development will go on faster or slower, will stop or turn back,
according to the resistances it meets. In a general way these obstacles
to improvement may, in relation to the society itself, be classed as
external and internal--the first operating with greater force in the
earlier stages of civilization, the latter becoming more important in
the later stages.

Man is social in his nature. He does not require to be caught and tamed
in order to induce him to live with his fellows. The utter helplessness
with which he enters the world, and the long period required for the
maturity of his powers, necessitate the family relation; which, as we
may observe, is wider, and in its extensions stronger, among the ruder
than among the more cultivated peoples. The first societies are
families, expanding into tribes, still holding a mutual blood
relationship, and even when they have become great nations claiming a
common descent.

Given beings of this kind, placed on a globe of such diversified surface
and climate as this, and it is evident that, even with equal capacity,
and an equal start, social development must be very different. The first
limit or resistance to association will come from the conditions of
physical nature, and as these greatly vary with locality, corresponding
differences in social progress must show themselves. The net rapidity of
increase, and the closeness with which men, as they increase, can keep
together, will, in the rude state of knowledge in which reliance for
subsistence must be principally upon the spontaneous offerings of
nature, very largely depend upon climate, soil, and physical
conformation. Where much animal food and warm clothing are required;
where the earth s