VI THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (II) The Social Organism is as natural a life-form as fish, flesh, or fowl. It has been naturally evolved, its processes and appearances are as natural as those of any other part of creation. We do not recognise it because of the interference of that ancestral brain; and we are further confused in looking at it by our arbitrary classification, resting on old and false ideas. As physical geography is confused to a child’s mind by the demarcations and contrasted colours of the map of political geography; so is the natural organic relation of Society confused in our minds by our superficial and artificial “social distinctions.” We have established social distinctions and relations on lines of physical connection, such as birth; whereas physical relationship has no similitude with social relationship; or of political connection, as nation or party; whereas, again, there is no resemblance; or on even more fantastic lines of sex, of caste, of creed, or of the amount of money possessed. These arbitrary distinctions are no more social and legitimately organic than Indiana is yellow and Ohio blue. Legitimate social relationship is functional. It is that relation in which we serve each other. Its classification is on lines of industrial evolution, together with the gradual development of those later functions of government, education, art, and science which follow the industrial. In the evolution of government the king was a normal functionary; his kingship being his power to act as general chairman of his assemblage of people, and, in very early days, as leader in battle. To make kingship hereditary was an arbitrary classification; social functions not developing in lines of physical heredity. You can no more make “a line of kings” than a line of poets or surgeons. If you do it, arbitrarily, you injure society by inferior service. That was the conspicuous result in the king line. In pre-social times there was merely the protoplasmic mass of undifferentiated human stock. Arising from this we have first the sporadic growth of villages, resting on their common food activities, and then the appearance of larger groups, and more and more diverse functions, elaborating in mutual dependence. The natural limits of an organic social relation are the limits of its essential functions. These were once quite narrow—each little community being self-supporting. To-day we are rapidly approaching a social organism limited only by the earth. Our interdependent functions are now international; and natural development on those lines is only prevented by our false classification on unnatural lines, with the resultant endeavour to maintain the self-supporting independence of the smaller unit.