Though the shareholders have given equal powers to the directors of theircompany, inequalities of power soon arise among them; and often the supremacyof some one director grows so marked, that his decisions determine the coursewhich the board takes. Nor in associations for political, charitable, literary,or other purposes, do we fail to find a like process of division into dominantand subordinate parties; each having its leader, its members of less influence,and its mass of uninfluential members. These minor instances in which unorganizedgroups of men, standing in homogeneous relations, may be watched graduallypassing into organized groups of men standing in heterogeneous relations,give us key to social inequalities. Barbarous and civilized communities arealike characterized by separation into classes, as well as by separationof each class into more important and less important units; and this structureis the gradually-consolidated result of a process like that daily exemplifiedin trading and other combinations. So long as men are constituted to acton one another, either by physical force or by force of character the strugglesfor supremacy must finally be decided in favour of some class or some one;and the difference once commenced must tend to become ever more marked. Itsunstable equilibrium being destroyed, the uniform must gravitate with increasingrapidity into the multiform. And so supremacy and subordination must establishthemselves, as we see they do, throughout the whole structure of a society,from the great class-divisions pervading its entire body, down to villagecliques, and even down to every posse of schoolboys. Probably it will beobjected that such changes result, not from the homogeneity of the originalaggregations, but from their non-homogeneity -- from certain slight difference***isting among their units at the outset. This is doubtless the proximatecause. In strictness, such changes must be regarded as transformations ofthe relatively homogeneous into the relatively heterogeneous. But an aggregationof men absolutely alike in their endowments, would eventually undergo a similartransformation. For in the absence of uniformity in the lives severally ledby them -- in their occupations, physical conditions, domestic relations,and trains of thought and feeling -- there must arise differences among them;and these must eventually initiate social differentiations. Even inequalitiesof health caused by accidents will, by entailing inequalities of physicaland mental power, disturb the exact balance of mutual influences among theunits; and the balance once disturbed, will inevitably be lost.
Turning to the industrial organization, and noting that its division intoregulative and operative is primarily determined, like the preceeding, bydifferences of power (women and slaves being the first working classes);admitting, too, that even among savages some small specializations arisefrom individual aptitudes; we go on to observe that the large industrialdivisions into which societies gravitate, are due to unlikenesses of externalcircumstances. Such divisions are absent until such unlikenesses are established.
