conjunction of a number of primitively independent existences into
a complex whole. The process of social organization appears to be
comparable, not so much to the process of organic development, as
to the synthesis of the chemist, by which independent elements are
gradually built up into complex aggregations--in which each element
retains an independent individuality, though held in subordination to
the whole. The atoms of carbon and hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, which
enter into a complex molecule, do not lose the powers originally
inherent in them, when they unite to form that molecule, the
properties of which express those forces of the whole aggregation
which are not neutralized and balanced by one another. Each atom has
given up something, in order that the atomic society, or molecule, may
subsist. And as soon as any one or more of the atoms thus associated
resumes the freedom which it has renounced, and follows some external
attraction, the molecule is broken up, and all the peculiar properties
which depended upon its constitution vanish.

Every society, great or small, resembles such a complex molecule,
in which the atoms are represented by men, possessed of all those
multifarious attractions and repulsions which are manifested in their
desires and volitions, the unlimited power of satisfying which, we
call freedom. The social molecule exists in virtue of the renunciation
of more or less of this freedom by every individual. It is decomposed,
when the attraction of desire leads to the resumption of that freedom,
the suppression of which is essential to the existence of the social
molecule. And the great problem of that social chemistry we call
politics, is to discover what desires of mankind may be gratified, and
what must be suppressed, if the highly complex compound, society,
is to avoid decomposition. That the gratification of some of
men's desires shall be renounced is essential to order; that the