Volume 1

First principles / by Herbert Spencer.

  • Herbert Spencer
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: First principles / by Herbert Spencer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    each highway, the course taken is that which deviates horizontally from a straight line so far only as is needful to avoid vertical deviations entailing greater labour in draught. The smallest total of obstructive forces determines the route, even in seemingly exceptional cases; as where a detour is made to avoid the opposi- tion of a landowner. All subsequent improvements, ending in macadamized roads, canals, and railways, which reduce the antagon- ism of friction and gravity to a minimum, exemplify the same truth. After there comes to be a choice of roads between one point and another, we still see that the road chosen is that along which the cost of transit is the least: cost being the measure of resistance. When there arises a marked localization of industries, the relative growths of the populations devoted to them may be interpreted on the same principle. The influx of people to each industrial centre is determined by the payment for labour, that is—by the quantity of commodities which a given amount of effort will obtain. To say that artisans flock to places where, in consequence of facilities for production, an extra proportion of produce can be given in the shape of wages, is to say that they flock to places where there are the smallest obstacles to the support of themselves and families; and so growth of the social organism takes place where the resistance is least. Nor is the law less clearly to be traced in those functional changes daily going on. The flow of capital into businesses yield- ing the largest returns, the buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, the introduction of more economical modes of manufacture, the development of better agencies for distribu- tion, exhibit movements taking place in directions where they are met by the smallest totals of opposing forces. For if we analyze each of these changes—if instead of interest on capital we read surplus of products which remains after maintenance of laboui'ers —if we thus interpret large interest or large surplus to imply labour expended with the greatest results—and if labour expended with the greatest results means muscular action so directed as to evade obstacles as far as possible; we see that all these commercial phenomena imply complicated motions set up along lines of least resistance. Social movements of these various orders severally conform to