All power whatever, that distinguishes man from the brute, that in any respect contributes to his commercial, mental, moral, or human value, is due to union, relation, action and interaction among individuals. In nature we may find illustrations of this truth. Sound, electricity, heat, and light, are forms of force which owe their existence to action, relation, interaction among material particles. They would never arise in a universe of unrelated elements. Their difference is due, not to the vibration of different elements, but to different rates of vibration among the same elements. Consequent upon certain terms of formal and quiet social intercourse among the molecules, there is sound. When they intermingle more actively and intimately, there is electricity. With a slight change in the method, but no decrease in the velocity with which they move, there is heat. When they go at the top of their speed, waltzing and swinging corners at an unthinkable rate, there is light. From varying relations and actions among material particles, we get the music which charms us, the means of communication which unite us, the power to do work which serves us, and the beauty which refines us. The unceasing play of these simple unseen elements made the fame of Beethoven, who threw their vibrations into symphonies; and of Morse, who utilized their speed to carry the news; and of Watt, who hitched their radiations to the flying train; and of Daguerre, who put their undulations to painting pictures. All forms of physical force may be traced to the union, relation, and vibration of material particles. The distance from atoms to men is well-nigh infinite, but the points of resemblance between the genesis of physical force and the genesis of social force are sufficiently striking to make it permissible to trace the analogy between them. By social force is understood all those forms of energy which men find themselves to possess by virtue of their relations to one another in organized social life. Commerce insures the union, and brings about the relations that make this force possible. It furnishes the conditions without which it could not be. A self-contained, self-included, insulated person does carry within the depths of his being the organs of the civilized man, but they are as completely out of sight and out of use as the harvests that sleep within the kernels of the mummy wheat. If it were possible for an individual to come to years of maturity, out of relations with his fellows, he would be more destitute than a brute. Such an one, growing up in the woods or on an island, with no associates but the squirrels and the birds, would not have the personal furnishments of the monkey or the fox.