It is utterly impossible, in a community where there is no order, no mutually understood arrangement of relations, duties, and pursuits; in other words, where there is no government; it is impossible, under such conditions, for individuals, if even of the best intentions, to live and do as they wish. For many wills must come into conflict, unless they can be harmonized, unless they have a mutual understanding and consent among each other that there shall be common and well-defined methods of procedure, under the countless circumstances in which men _must_ act together, or not act at all. Now, it is the true function of government to establish, these common or general modes of procedure, termed laws, among masses, and to punish departures from them. Government is thus the great social harmonizer of these otherwise necessarily conflicting and mutually interfering human energies. Government cooerdinates, harmonizes, concentrates the efforts of multitudes. It does this by establishing and maintaining _order_, an orderly arrangement of human activities--arrangements, methods of procedure, which are adapted to the wants of the community, and _into_ which men's activities flow freely and spontaneously, and without compulsion (except in the case of violators of law), because of their adaptation to the public wants. But now, what constitutes order? What is its essential nature? The answer is, that order is the harmonious relation of parts in a whole; and parts can have no orderly, that is, symmetrical and harmonious, relation to each other, except through their relation to a common centre. Order is the _sub_ordination of things, of things lower to something that is higher; and _sub_ordination is the ordination or ordering of parts _under_ something that is above--something to which the rest must _con_form, that is, must form themselves or be formed _with_ it, in harmony with it, if order is to result. This something is thus, of course, that which is central--the chief element in the group; that which is the most prominent feature, and which gives character to all subordinate parts. It is thus clearly evident that the very essence of government, of order, of harmony, of subordination, is the grouping of individual parts around centres; of these compound units as larger individuals, around some higher centre again, and so on, until a limit is prescribed by the very nature of the thing thus organized into an ascending series of compounds. This method of grouping and organizing parts into wholes, is, as we have already seen, the divine method; and, of course, being such, as has also been said, it is seen in every created object--in minerals, plants, animals, and in the systems of suns and planets.