ous societies which ask the time and funds of thinkers and philanthropists.
In America there are no legal restrictions on the formation of such bodies, and our laws even favor their multiplication and facilitate their incorporation. The only defense of a long-suffering public is publicity and criticism.
The family is not a voluntary association in the sense of the word here employed. Each human being becomes a member of the domestic institution by birth and not by choice, and at the age when reflection begins he discovers that this institution has already done its work upon him. The marriage contract is, indeed, relatively free, but the form of the union is determined partly by the elementary impulses of nature and the facts of sex and partly by the customs and laws through which society enforces its beliefs respecting the conditions of the common welfare.
Industrial organization is, in the main, determined by nature, general custom and legislation, and it changes very slowly in response to the movements of events and the devices of reformers. Men may freely form contractual partnerships or buy stock in corporations, but once in the toils of an agreement the range of their movements is quite distinctly marked out by law.
The church is an institution whose rigidity and conservatism are proverbial. Devotees boast that she never changes and doubters stigmatize her as a fossil. The golden medium is nearer the truth. The church is like all other institutions which have a vast range of movement in time and space and a long life; she grows, but must be rooted deeply in order to resist frost and drought and to abide the storms. The church is not an organization which can readily be made over by the combined efforts of a small circle of advanced thinkers.
The state is not a voluntary organization based on contract and formed by a convention. It is a growth, and all ages past have contributed threads for its warp and woof. All its citizens are born to its rights and obligations or pass into its life from without by solemn process of adoption and naturalization.
