Anthropogeographical and biological investigations have proceeded upon
the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the geographic environment,
and the physical and mental traits of races and individuals, _determine_
individual and collective behavior. What investigations in human
geography and heredity actually demonstrate is that the geographic
environment and the original nature of man _condition_ the culture and
conduct of groups and of persons. The explanations of isolation, so far
as it affects social life, which have gained currency in the writings of
anthropologists and geographers, are therefore too simple. Sociologists
are able to take into account forms of isolation not considered by the
students of the physical environment and of racial inheritance. Studies
of folkways, mores, culture, nationality, the products of a historical
or cultural process, disclose types of social contact which transcend
the barriers of geographical or racial separation, and reveal social
forms of isolation which prevent communication where there is close
geographical contact or common racial bonds.
The literature upon isolated peoples ranges from investigations of
arrest of cultural development as, for example, the natives of
Australia, the Mountain Whites of the southern states, or the
inhabitants of Pitcairn Island to studies of hermit nations, of caste
systems as in India, or of outcast groups such as feeble-minded "tribes"
or hamlets, fraternities of criminals, and the underworld of
commercialized prostitution. Special research in dialects, in folklore,
and in provincialism shows how spatial isolation fixes differences in
speech, attitudes, folkways, and mores which, in turn, enforce isolation
even when geographic separation has disappeared.
The most significant contribution to the study of isolation from the
sociological standpoint has undoubtedly been made by Fishberg in a work
entitled _The Jews, a Study of Race and Environment_. The author points
out that the isolation of the Jew has been the result of neither
physical environment nor of race, but of social barriers. "Judaism has
been preserved throughout the long years of Israel's dispersion by two
factors: its separative ritualism, which prevented close and intimate
contact with non-Jews, and the iron laws of the Christian theocracies of
Europe which encouraged and enforced 'isolation.'"[116]
3. Isolation and Personality
Philosophers, mystics, and religious enthusiasts have invariably
stressed privacy for meditation, retirement for ecstatic communion with
God, and withdrawal from the contamination of the world. In 1784-86
Zimmermann wrote an elaborate essay in which he dilates upon "the
question whether it is easier to live virtuously in society or in
solitude," considering in Part I "the influence of occasional retirement
upon the mind and the heart" and in Part II "the pernicious influence of
a total exclusion from society upon the mind and the heart."
Actual research upon the effect of isolation upon personal development
has more of future promise than of present accomplishment. The
literature upon cases of feral men is practically all of the anecdotal
type with observations by persons untrained in the modern scientific
method. One case, however, "the savage of Aveyron" was studied
intensively by Itard, the French philosopher and otologist who cherished
high hopes of his mental and social development. After five years spent
in a patient and varied but futile attempt at education, he confessed
his bitter disappointment. "Since my pains are lost and efforts
fruitless, take yourself back to your forest and primitive tastes; or if
your new wants make you dependent on society, suffer the penalty of
being useless, and go to Bicêtre, there to die in wretchedness."
Only second in importance to the cases of feral men are the
investigations which have been made of the results of solitary
confinement. Morselli, in his well-known work on _Suicide_, presented
statistics showing that self-destruction was many times as frequent
among convicts under the system of absolute isolation as compared with
that of association during imprisonment. Studies of Auburn prison in New
York, of Mountjoy in England, and penal institutions on the continent
show the effects of solitary incarceration in the increase of cases of
suicides, insanity, invalidism, and death.
Beginnings have been made in child study, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis
of the effects of different types of isolation upon personal
development. Some attention has been given to the study of effects upon
mentality and personality of physical defects such as deaf-mutism and
blindness. Students of the so-called "morally defective child," that is
the child who appears deficient in emotional and sympathetic responses,
suggest as a partial explanation the absence in infancy and early
childhood of intimate and sympathetic contacts with the mother. An
investigation not yet made but of decisive bearing upon this point will
be a comparative study of children brought up in families with those
reared in institutions.
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis in probing mental life and personality
have related certain mental and social abnormalities to isolation from
social contact. Studies of paranoia and of egocentric personalities have
resulted in the discovery of the only or favorite child complex. The
exclusion of the boy or girl in the one-child family from the give and
take of democratic relations with brothers and sisters results,
according to the theory advanced, in a psychopathic personality of the
self-centered type. A contributing cause of homosexuality, it is said by
psychoanalysts, is the isolation during childhood from usual association
with individuals of the same sex. Research in dementia praecox discloses
a symptom and probably a cause of this mental malady to be the
withdrawal of the individual from normal social contacts and the
substitution of an imaginary for a real world of persons and events.
Dementia praecox has been related by one psychoanalyst to the "shut-in"
type of personality.
The literature on the subject of privacy in its relation to personal
development is fragmentary but highly promising for future research. The
study of the introspective type of personality suggests that
self-analysis is the counterpart of the inhibition of immediate and
impulsive self-expression in social relations. Materials for an
understanding of the relation of retirement and privacy to the
aesthetic, moral, and creative life of the person may be found in the
lives of hermits, inventors, and religious leaders; in the studies of
seclusion, prayer, and meditation; and in research upon taboo, prestige,
and attitudes of superiority and inferiority.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF ISOLATION
I. CHARACTERISTIC SENTIMENTS AND ATTITUDES OF THE ISOLATED PERSON
(1) Zimmermann, Johann G. _Solitude._ Or the effects of occasional
retirement on the mind, the heart, general society. Translated from the
German. London, 1827.
(2) Canat, René. _Une forme du mal du siècle._ Du sentiment de la
solitude morale chez les romantiques et les parnassiens. Paris, 1904.
(3) Goltz, E. von der. _Das Gebet in der aeltesten Christenheit._
Leipzig, 1901.
(4) Strong, Anna L. _A Consideration of Prayer from the Standpoint of
Social Psychology._ Chicago, 1908.
(5) Hoch, A. "On Some of the Mental Mechanisms in Dementia Praecox,"
_Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, V (1910), 255-73. [A study of the
isolated person.]
(6) Bohannon, E. W. "Only Child," _Pedagogical Seminary_, V (1897-98),
475-96.
(7) Brill, A. A. _Psychanalysis._ Its theories and practical
application. "The Only or Favorite Child in Adult Life," pp. 253-65. 2d
rev. ed. Philadelphia and London, 1914.
(8) Neter, Eugen. _Das einzige Kind und seine Erziehung._ Ein ernstes
Mahnwort an Eltern und Erzieher. München, 1914.
(9) Whiteley, Opal S. _The Story of Opal._ Boston, 1920.
(10) Delbrück, A. _Die pathologische Lüge und die psychisch abnormen
Schwindler._ Stuttgart, 1891.
(11) Healy, Wm. _Pathological Lying._ Boston, 1915.
(12) Dostoévsky, F. _The House of the Dead; or, Prison Life in Siberia._
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. New York, 1915.
(13) Griffiths, Arthur. _Secrets of the Prison House, or Gaol Studies
and Sketches._ I, 262-80. London, 1894.
(14) Kingsley, Charles. _The Hermits._ London and New York, 1871.
(15) Baring-Gould, S. _Lives of Saints._ 16 vols. Rev. ed. Edinburgh,
1916. [See references in index to hermits.]
(16) Solenberger, Alice W. _One Thousand Homeless Men._ A study of
original records. Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1911.
II. TYPES OF ISOLATION AND TYPES OF SOCIAL GROUPS
(1) Fishberg, Maurice. _The Jews._ A study of race and environment.
London and New York, 1911.
(2) Gummere, Amelia M. _The Quaker._ A study in costume. Philadelphia,
1901.
(3) Webster, Hutton. _Primitive Secret Societies._ A study in early
politics and religion. New York, 1908.
(4) Heckethorn, C. W. _The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries._
A comprehensive account of upwards of one hundred and sixty secret
organizations--religious, political, and social--from the most remote
ages down to the present time. 2 vols. New ed., rev. and enl. London,
1897.
(5) Fosbroke, Thomas D. _British Monachism, or Manners and Customs of
the Monks and Nuns of England._ London, 1817.
(6) Wishart, Alfred W. _A Short History of Monks and Monasteries._
Trenton, N.J., 1900. [Chap. i, pp. 17-70, gives an account of the monk
as a type of human nature.]
III. GEOGRAPHICAL ISOLATION AND CULTURAL AREAS
(1) Ratzel, Friedrich. _Politische Geographie; oder, Die Geographie der
Staaten, des Verkehres und des Krieges._ 2d. ed. München, 1903.
(2) Semple, Ellen. _Influences of Geographic Environment, on the Basis
of Ratzel's System of Anthropogeography._ Chap. xiii, "Island Peoples,"
pp. 409-72. New York, 1911. [Bibliography.]
(3) Brunhes, Jean. _Human Geography._ An attempt at a positive
classification, principles, and examples. 2d ed. Translated from the
French by T. C. LeCompte. Chicago, 1920. [See especially chaps. vi, vii,
and viii, pp. 415-569.]
(4) Vallaux, Camille. _La Mer._ (Géographie Sociale.) Populations
maritimes, migrations, pêches, commerce, domination de la mer, Chap.
iii, "Les isles et l'insularité." Paris, 1908.
(5) Gerland, Georg. _Atlas der Völkerkunde._ Gotha, 1892. [Indicates the
geographical distribution of differences in skin color, hair form,
clothing, customs, languages, etc.]
(6) Ripley, William Z. _The Races of Europe._ A sociological study. New
York, 1899.
(7) Campbell, John C. _The Southern Highlander and His Homeland._ New
York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1921. [Bibliography.]
(8) Barrow, Sir John. _A Description of Pitcairn's Island and Its
Inhabitants._ With an authentic account of the mutiny of the ship
"Bounty" and of the subsequent fortunes of the mutineers. New York,
1832.
(9) Routledge, Mrs. Scoresby. _The Mystery of Easter Island._ The story
of an expedition. Chap. xx, "Pitcairn Island." London, 1919.
(10) Galpin, Charles J. _Rural Life._ New York, 1918.
IV. LANGUAGE FRONTIERS AND NATIONALITY
(1) Dominian, Leon. _The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in
Europe._ New York, 1917. [Bibliography, pp. 348-56.]
(2) Auerbach, Bertrand. _Les Races et les nationalités en
Autriche-Hongrie._ 2d rev. ed. Paris, 1917.
(3) Bernhard, L. _Das polnische Gemeinwesen im preussischen Staat._ Die
Polenfrage. Leipzig, 1910.
(4) Bourgoing, P. de. _Les guerres d'idiome et de nationalité._
Tableaux, esquisses, et souvenirs d'histoire contemporaine. Paris, 1849.
(5) _Cambridge Modern History_, Vol. XI, "The Growth of Nationalities."
Cambridge, 1909.
(6) Meillet, A. "Les Langues et les Nationalités," _Scientia_, Vol.
XVIII, (Sept., 1915), pp. 192-201.
(7) Pfister, Ch. "La limite de la langue française et de la langue
allemande en Alsace-Lorraine," Considérations historiques. _Bull. Soc.
Géogr. de l'Est_, Vol. XII, 1890.
(8) This, G. "Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze in Lothringen,"
_Beiträge zur Landes- und Volkskunde von Elsass-Lothringen_, Vol. I,
Strassburg, 1887.
(9)----. "Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze in Elsass," _ibid._,
1888.
V. DIALECTS AS A FACTOR IN ISOLATION
(1) Babbitt, Eugene H. "College Words and Phrases," _Dialect Notes_, II
(1900-1904), 3-70.
(2)----. "The English of the Lower Classes in New York City and
Vicinity," _Dialect Notes_, Vol. I, Part ix, 1896.
(3)----. "The Geography of the Great Languages," _World's Work_, Feb. 15
(1907-8), 9903-7.
(4) Churchill, William. _Beach-la-mar: the Jargon or Trade Speech of the
Western Pacific._ Washington, 1911.
(5) Dana, Richard H., Jr. _A Dictionary of Sea Terms._ London, 1841.
(6) Elliott, A.M. "Speech-Mixture in French Canada: English and French,"
_American Journal of Philology_, X (1889), 133.
(7) Flaten, Nils. "Notes on American-Norwegian with a Vocabulary,"
_Dialect Notes_, II (1900-1904), 115-26.
(8) Harrison, James A. "Negro-English," _Transactions and Proceedings
American Philological Association_, XVI (1885), Appendix, pp.
xxxi-xxxiii.
(9) Hempl, George. "Language-Rivalry and Speech-Differentiation in the
Case of Race-Mixture," _Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Philological Association_. XXIX (1898), 31-47.
(10) Knortz, Karl. _Amerikanische Redensarten und Volksgebräuche._
Leipzig, 1907.
(11) Letzner, Karl. _Wörterbuch der englischen Volkssprache Australiens
und der englischen Mischsprachen._ Halle, 1891.
(12) Pettman, Charles. _Africanderisms._ A glossary of South African
colloquial words and phrases and of place and other names. London and
New York, 1913.
(13) Ralph, Julian. "The Language of the Tenement-Folk," _Harper's
Weekly_, XLI (Jan. 23, 1897), 90.
(14) Skeat, Walter W. _English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the
Present Day_. Cambridge, 1911.
(15) Yule, Henry, and Burnell, A. C. _Hobson-Jobson._ A glossary of
colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms,
etymological, historical, geographical, and discursive; new ed. by Wm.
Crooke, London, 1903.
VI. PHYSICAL DEFECT AS A FORM OF ISOLATION
(1) Bell, Alexander G. "Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of
the Human Race." _National Academy of Sciences, Memoirs_, II, 177-262.
Washington, D.C., 1884.
(2) Fay, Edward A. _Marriages of the Deaf in America._ An inquiry
concerning the results of marriages of the deaf in America. Washington,
D.C., 1893.
(3) Desagher, Maurice. "La timidité chez les aveugles," _Revue
philosophique_, LXXVI (1913), 269-74.
(4) Best, Harry. _The Deaf._ Their position in society and the provision
for their education in the United States. New York, 1914.
(5) ----. _The Blind._ Their condition and the work being done for them
in the United States. New York, 1919.
VII. FERAL MEN
(1) Rauber, August. _Homo Sapiens Ferus_; oder, Die Zustände der
Verwilderten und ihre Bedeutung für Wissenschaft, Politik, und Schule.
Leipzig, 1885.
(2) Seguin, Edward. _Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Physiological
Method._ Pp. 14-23. New York, 1866.
(3) Bonnaterre, J. P. _Notice historique sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron, et
sur quelques autres individus qu'on a trouvés dans les forêts à
différentes époques._ Paris, 1800.
(4) Itard, Jean E. M. G. _De l'éducation d'un homme sauvage, et des
premiers developpemens physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de
l'Aveyron._ Pp. 45-46. Paris, 1801.
(5) Feuerbach, Paul J. A. von. _Caspar Hauser._ An account of an
individual kept in a dungeon from early childhood, to about the age of
seventeen. Translated from the German by H. G. Linberg. London, 1834.
(6) Stanhope, Philip Henry [4th Earl]. _Tracts relating to Caspar
Hauser._ Translated from the original German. London, 1836.
(7) Lang, Andrew. _Historical Mysteries._ London, 1904.
(8) Tredgold, A. F. _Mental Deficiency._ "Isolation Amentia," pp.
297-305. 3d rev. ed. New York, 1920.
TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES
1. Isolation as a Condition of Originality.
2. The Relation of Social Contact and of Isolation to Historic
Inventions and Discoveries, as the Law of Gravitation, Mendelian
Inheritance, the Electric Light, etc.
3. Isolated Types: the Hermit, the Mystic, the Prophet, the Stranger,
and the Saint.
4. Isolation, Segregation, and the Physically Defective: as the Blind,
the Deaf-Mute, the Physically Handicapped.
5. Isolated Areas and Cultural Retardation: the Southern Mountaineer,
Pitcairn Islanders, the Australian Aborigines.
6. "Moral" Areas, Isolation, and Segregation: City Slums, Vice
Districts, "Breeding-places of Crime."
7. The Controlled versus the Natural process of Segregation of the
Feeble-minded.
8. Isolation and Insanity.
9. Privacy in the Home.
10. Isolation and Prestige.
11. Isolation as a Defence against the Invasion of Personality.
12. Nationalism as a Form of Isolation.
13. Biological and Social Immunity: or Biological Immunity from
Infection, Personal or Group Immunity against Social Contagion.
14. The Only Child.
15. The Pathological Liar Considered from the Point of View of
Isolation.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Is the distinction between isolation and social contact relative or
absolute?
2. What illustrations of the various forms of isolation, spatial,
structural, habitudinal, and psychical, occur to you?
3. By what process does isolation cause racial differentiation?
4. What is the relation of endogamy and exogamy (a) to isolation, and
(b) to the establishment of a successful stock or race?
5. In what ways do the Jews and the Americans as racial types illustrate
the effects of isolation and of contact?
6. What do you understand to be Bacon's definition of solitude?
7. What is the point in the saying "A great town is a great solitude"?
8. What is the sociology of the creation by a solitary person of
imaginary companions?
9. Under what conditions does an individual prefer solitude to society?
Give illustrations.
10. What are the devices used in prayer to secure isolation?
11. "Prayer has value in that it develops the essentially social form of
personal self-realization." Explain.
12. What are the interrelations of social contact and of privacy in the
development of the ideal self?
13. What do you understand by the relation of erudition to originality?
14. In what ways does isolation (a) promote, (b) impede,
originality? What other factors beside isolation are involved in
originality?
15. What is the value of privacy?
16. What was the value of the monasteries?
17. What conclusions do you derive from the study of the cases of feral
men? Do these cases bear out the theory of Aristotle in regard to the
effect of isolation upon the individual?
18. What is the significance of Helen Keller's account of how she broke
through the barriers of isolation?
19. What were the mental effects of solitude described by Hudson? How do
you explain the difference between the descriptions of the effect of
solitude in the accounts given by Rousseau and by Hudson?
20. How does Galpin explain the relation of isolation to the development
of the "rural mind"?
21. What are the effects of isolation upon the young man or young woman
reared in the country?
22. Was Lincoln the product of isolation or of social contact?
23. To what extent are rural problems the result of isolation?
24. What do you understand by Thomas' statement, "The savage, the Negro,
the peasant, the slum dwellers, and the white woman are notable
sufferers by exclusion"?
25. What other of the subtler forms of isolation occur to you?
26. Is isolation to be regarded as always a disadvantage?
27. What do you understand by segregation as a process?
28. Give illustrations of groups other than those mentioned which have
become segregated as a result of isolation.
29. How would you describe the process by which isolation leads to the
segregation of the feeble-minded?
30. Why does a segregated group, like the feeble-minded, become an
isolated group?
31. What are other illustrations of isolation resulting from
segregation?
32. How would you compare Europe with the other continents with
reference to number and distribution of isolated areas?
33. What do you understand to be the nature of the influence of the
cradle land upon "the historical race"?
34. What illustrations from the Great War would you give of the effects
(a) of central location; (b) of peripheral location?
35. How do you explain the contrast between the characteristics of the
inhabitants of the Grecian inland and maritime cities?
36. To what extent may (a) the rise of the Greek city state, (b)
Grecian intellectual development, and (c) the history of Greece, be
interpreted in terms of geographic isolation?
37. To what extent can you explain the cultural retardation of Africa,
as compared with European progress, by isolation?
38. Does race or isolation explain more adequately the following
cultural differences for the several areas of France--divorce, intensity
of suicide, distribution of awards, relative frequency of men of
letters?
39. What is the relation of village and city emigration and immigration
to isolation?
40. What is the difference between a natural and a vicinal location?
41. In what ways does isolation affect national development?
42. What is the relation of geographical position in area to
literature?
FOOTNOTES:
[94] J. Arthur Thomson, _Heredity_, pp. 536-37. (G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1908.)
[95] From Francis Bacon, _Essays_, "Of Friendship."
[96] Adapted from Jean Jacques Rousseau, _Letter to the President de
Malesherbes, 1762_.
[97] Adapted from George Albert Coe, _The Psychology of Religion_, pp.
311-18. (The University of Chicago Press, 1917.)
[98] From T. Sharper Knowlson, _Originality_, pp. 173-75. (T. Werner
Laurie, 1918.)
[99] From Maurice H. Small, "On Some Psychical Relations of Society and
Solitude," in the _Pedagogical Seminary_, VII, No. 2 (1900), 32-36.
[100] _Anthropological Review_, I (London, 1863), 21 ff.
[101] _All the Year_, XVIII, 302 ff.
[102] _Chambers' Journal_, LIX, 579 ff.
[103] _The Penny Magazine_, II, 113.
[104] Wagner, _Beitragen zur philosophischen Anthropologie_; Rauber, pp.
49-55.
[105] "Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l'âge
de dix ans," _Magazin der Natur, Kunst, und Wissenschaft_, Leipzig,
1756, pp. 219-72; _Mercure de France_, December, 1731; Rudolphi,
_Grundriss der Physiologie_, I, 25; Blumenbach, _Beiträge zur
Naturgeschichte_, II, 38.
[106] Adapted from Helen Keller, _The Story of My Life_, pp. 22-24.
(Doubleday, Page & Co., 1917.)
[107] Adapted from W. H. Hudson, "The Plains of Patagonia," _Universal
Review_, VII (1890), 551-57.
[108] Adapted from C. J. Galpin, _Rural Social Centers in Wisconsin_,
pp. 1-3. (Wisconsin Experiment Station, Bulletin 234, 1913.)
[109] Adapted from W. I. Thomas, "Race Psychology," in the _American
Journal of Sociology_, XVII (1911-12), 744-47.
[110] Adapted from Robert E. Park, "The City: Suggestions for the
Investigation of Behavior in the City Environment," in the _American
Journal of Sociology_, XX (1915), 579-83.
[111] Adapted from L. W. Crafts and E. A. Doll, "The Proportion of
Mental Defectives among Juvenile Delinquents," in the _Journal of
Delinquency_, II (1917), 123-37.
[112] Adapted from N. S. Shaler, _Nature and Man in America_, pp.
151-66. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900.)
[113] Adapted from George Grote, _History of Greece_, II, 149-57. (John
Murray, 1888.)
[114] From William Z. Ripley, _The Races of Europe_, pp. 515-30. (D.
Appleton & Co., 1899.)
[115] Adapted from Ellen C. Semple, _Influences of Geographic
Environment_, pp. 132-33. (Henry Holt & Co., 1911.)
[116] Fishberg, _op. cit._, p. 555.
CHAPTER V
SOCIAL CONTACTS
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Preliminary Notions of Social Contact
The fundamental social process is that of interaction. This interaction
is (a) of persons with persons, and (b) of groups with groups. The
simplest aspect of interaction, or its primary phase, is contact.
Contact may be considered as the initial stage of interaction, and
preparatory to the later stages. The phenomena of social contact require
analysis before proceeding to the more difficult study of the mechanism
of social interaction.
"With whom am I in contact?" Common sense has in stock ready answers to
this question.
There is, first of all, the immediate circle of contact through the
senses. Touch is the most intimate kind of contact. Face-to-face
relations include, in addition to touch, visual and auditory sensations.
Speech and hearing by their very nature establish a bond of contact
between persons.
Even in common usage, the expression "social contact" is employed beyond
the limits fixed by the immediate responses of touch, sight, and
hearing. Its area has expanded to include connection through all the
forms of communication, i.e., language, letters, and the printed page;
connection through the medium of the telephone, telegraph, radio, moving
picture, etc. The evolution of the devices for communication has taken
place in the fields of two senses alone, those of hearing and seeing.
Touch remains limited to the field of primary association. But the
newspaper with its elaborate mechanism of communication gives publicity
to events in London, Moscow, and Tokio, and the motion picture unreels
to our gaze scenes from distant lands and foreign peoples with all the
illusion of reality.
The frontiers of social contact are farther extended to the widest
horizons, by commerce. The economists, for example, include in their
conception of society the intricate and complex maze of relations
created by the competition and co-operation of individuals and societies
within the limits of a world-wide economy. This inclusion of unconscious
as well as conscious reciprocal influences in the concept of social
relations brings into "contact" the members of a village missionary
society with the savages of the equatorial regions of Africa; or the
pale-faced drug addict, with the dark-skinned Hindu laborers upon the
opium fields of Benares; or the man gulping down coffee at the breakfast
table, with the Java planter; the crew of the Pacific freighter and its
cargo of spices with the American wholesaler and retailer in food
products. In short, everyone is in a real, though concealed and devious,
way in contact with every other person in the world. Contacts of this
type, remote from the familiar experiences of everyday life, have
reality to the intellectual and the mystic and are appreciated by the
masses only when co-operation breaks down, or competition becomes
conscious and passes into conflict.
These three popular meanings of contacts emphasize (1) the intimacy of
sensory responses, (2) the extension of contact through devices of
communication based upon sight and hearing, and (3) the solidarity and
interdependence created and maintained by the fabric of social life,
woven as it is from the intricate and invisible strands of human
interests in the process of a world-wide competition and co-operation.
2. The Sociological Concept of Contact
The use of the term "contact" in sociology is not a departure from, but
a development of, its customary significance. In the preceding chapter
the point was made that the distinction between isolation and contact is
not absolute but relative. Members of a society spatially separate, but
socially in contact through sense perception and through communication
of ideas, may be thereby mobilized to collective behavior. Sociological
interest in this situation lies in the fact that the various kinds of
social contacts between persons and groups determine behavior. The
student of problems of American society, for example, realizes the
necessity of understanding the mutual reactions involved in the contacts
of the foreign and the native-born, of the white and the negro, and of
employers and employees. In other words, contact, as the first stage of
social interaction, conditions and controls the later stages of the
process.
It is convenient, for certain purposes, to conceive of contact in terms
of space. The contacts of persons and of groups may then be plotted in
units of _social distance_. This permits graphic representation of
relations of sequence and of coexistence in terms both of units of
separation and of contact. This spatial conception may now be applied to
the explanation of the readings in social contacts.
3. Classification of the Materials
In sociological literature there have grown up certain distinctions
between types of social contacts. Physical contacts are distinguished
from social contacts; relations within the "in-group" are perceived to
be different from relations with the "out-group"; contacts of historical
continuity are compared with contacts of mobility; primary contacts are
set off from secondary contacts. How far and with what advantage may
these distinctions be stated in spatial terms?
a) _Land as a basis for social contacts._--The position of persons and
peoples on the earth gives us a literal picture of the spatial
conception of social contact. The cluster of homes in the Italian
agricultural community suggests the difference in social life in
comparison with the isolated homesteads of rural America. A gigantic
spot map of the United States upon which every family would be indicated
by a dot would represent schematically certain different conditions
influencing group behavior in arid areas, the open country, hamlets,
villages, towns, and cities. The movements of persons charted with
detail sufficient to bring out variations in the daily, weekly, monthly,
and yearly routine, would undoubtedly reveal interesting identities and
differences in the intimacy and intensity of social contacts. It would
be possible and profitable to classify people with reference to the
routine of their daily lives.
b) _Touch as the physiological basis of social contact._--According to
the spatial conception the closest contacts possible are those of touch.
The physical proximity involved in tactile sensations is, however, but
the symbol of the intensity of the reactions to contact. Desire and
aversion for contacts, as Crawley shows in his selection, arise in the
most intimate relations of human life. Love and hate, longing and
disgust, sympathy and hostility increase in intensity with intimacy of
association. It is a current sociological fallacy that closeness of
contact results only in the growth of good will. The fact is, that with
increasing contact either attraction or repulsion may be the outcome,
depending upon the situation and upon factors not yet fully analyzed.
Peculiar conditions of contact, as its prolonged duration, its frequent
repetition, just as in the case of isolation from normal association,
may lead to the inversion of the original impulses and sentiments of
affection and antipathy.[117]
c) _Contacts with the "in-group" and with the "out-group."_--The
conception of the we-group in terms of distance is that of a group in
which the solidarity of units is so complete that the movements and
sentiments of all are completely regulated with reference to their
interests and behavior as a group. This control by the in-group over its
members makes for solidity and impenetrability in its relations with the
out-group. Sumner in his _Folkways_ indicates how internal sympathetic
contacts and group egotism result in double standards of behavior:
good-will and co-operation within the members of the in-group, hostility
and suspicion toward the out-group and its members. The essential point
is perhaps best brought out by Shaler in his distinction between
sympathetic and categoric contacts. He describes the transition from
contacts of the out-group to those of the in-group, or from remote to
intimate relations. From a distance, a person has the characteristics of
his group, upon close acquaintance he reveals his individuality.
d) _Historical continuity and mobility._--Historical continuity, which
maintains the identity of the present with the past, implies the
existence of a body of tradition which is transmitted from the older to
the younger generations. Through the medium of tradition, including in
that term all the learning, science, literature, and practical arts, not
to speak of the great body of oral tradition which is after all a larger
part of life than we imagine, the historical and cultural life is
maintained. This is the meaning of the long period of childhood in man
during which the younger generation is living under the care and
protection of the older. When, for any reason, this contact of the
younger with the older generation is interrupted--as is true in the case
of immigrants--a very definite cultural deterioration frequently ensues.
Contacts of mobility are those of a changing present, and measure the
number and variety of the stimulations which the social life and
movements--the discovery of the hour, the book of the moment, the
passing fads and fashions--afford. Contacts of mobility give us novelty
and news. It is through contacts of this sort that change takes place.
Mobility, accordingly, measures not merely the social contacts that one
gains from travel and exploration, but the stimulation and suggestions
that come to us through the medium of communication, by which sentiments
and ideas are put in social circulation. Through the newspaper, the
common man of today participates in the social movements of his time.
His illiterate forbear of yesterday, on the other hand, lived unmoved by
the current of world-events outside his hamlet. The _tempo_ of modern
societies may be measured comparatively by the relative perfection of
devices of communication and the rapidity of the circulation of
sentiments, opinions, and facts. Indeed, the efficiency of any society
or of any group is to be measured not alone in terms of numbers or of
material resources, but also in terms of mobility and access through
communication and publicity to the common fund of tradition and culture.
e) _Primary and secondary contacts._--Primary contacts are those of
"intimate face-to-face association"; secondary contacts are those of
externality and greater distance. A study of primary association
indicates that this sphere of contact falls into two areas: one of
intimacy and the other of acquaintance. In the diagram which follows,
the field of primary contacts has been subdivided so that it includes
(x) a circle of greater intimacy, (y) a wider circle of
acquaintanceship. The completed chart would appear as shown on page 285.
Primary contacts of the greatest intimacy are (a) those represented by
the affections that ordinarily spring up within the family, particularly
between parents and children, husband and wife; and (b) those of
fellowship and affection outside the family as between lovers, bosom
friends, and boon companions. These relations are all manifestations of
a craving for response. These personal relationships are the nursery for
the development of human nature and personality. John Watson, who
studied several hundred new-born infants in the psychological
laboratory, concludes that "the first few years are the all-important
ones, for shaping the emotional life of the child."[118] The primary
virtues and ideals of which Cooley writes so sympathetically are, for
the most part, projections from family life. Certainly in these most
intimate relations of life in the contacts of the family circle, in the
closest friendships, personality is most severely tried, realizes its
most characteristic expressions, or is most completely disorganized.
[Illustration: FIG. 3
A, primary contacts; x, greater intimacy; y, acquaintanceship;
B, secondary contacts]
Just as the life of the family represents the contacts of touch and
response, the neighborhood or the village is the natural area of primary
contacts and the city the social environment of secondary contacts. In
primary association individuals are in contact with each other at
practically all points of their lives. In the village "everyone knows
everything about everyone else." Canons of conduct are absolute, social
control is omnipotent, the status of the family and the individual is
fixed. In secondary association individuals are in contact with each
other at only one or two points in their lives. In the city, the
individual becomes anonymous; at best he is generally known in only one
or two aspects of his life. Standards of behavior are relative; the old
primary controls have disappeared; the new secondary instruments of
discipline, necessarily formal, are for the most part crude and
inefficient; the standing of the family and of the individual is
uncertain and subject to abrupt changes upward or downward in the social
scale.
Simmel has made a brilliant contribution in his analysis of the
sociological significance of "the stranger." "The stranger" in the
sociological sense is the individual who unites in his social relations
primary and secondary contacts. Simmel himself employs the conception of
social distance in his statement of the stranger as the combination of
the near and the far. It is interesting and significant to determine the
different types of the union of intimacy and externality in the
relations of teacher and student, physician and patient, minister and
layman, lawyer and client, social worker and applicant for relief.
A complete analysis of the bearing upon personal and cultural life of
changes from a society based upon contacts of continuity and of primary
relations to a society of increasing mobility organized around secondary
contacts cannot be given here. Certain of the most obvious contrasts of
the transition may, however, be stated. Increasing mobility of persons
in society almost inevitably leads to change and therefore to loss of
continuity. In primary groups, where social life moves slowly, there is
a greater sense of continuity than in secondary groups where it moves
rapidly.
There is a further contrast if not conflict between direct and intimate
contacts and contacts based upon communication of ideas. All sense of
values, as Windelband has pointed out,[119] rests upon concrete
experience, that is to say upon sense contacts. Society, to the extent
that it is organized about secondary contacts, is based upon
abstractions, upon science and technique. Secondary contacts of this
type have only secondary values because they represent means rather than
ends. Just as all behavior arises in sense impressions it must also
terminate in sense impressions to realize its ends and attain its
values. The effect of life in a society based on secondary contacts is
to build up between the impulse and its end a world of means, to project
values into the future, and to direct life toward the realization of
distant hopes.
The ultimate effect upon the individual as he becomes accommodated to
secondary society is to find a substitute expression for his primary
response in the artificial physical environment of the city. The
detachment of the person from intimate, direct, and spontaneous contacts
with social reality is in large measure responsible for the intricate
maze of problems of urban life.
The change from concrete and personal to abstract and impersonal
relations in economic and social life began with the Industrial
Revolution. The machine is the symbol of the monotonous routine of
impersonal, unskilled, large-scale production just as the hand tool is
the token of the interesting activity of personal, skilled, handicraft
work. The so-called "instinct of workmanship" no longer finds expression
in the anonymous standardized production of modern industry.[120]
It is not in industry alone that the natural impulses of the person for
response, recognition, and self-expression are balked. In social work,
politics, religion, art, and sport the individual is represented now by
proxies where formerly he participated in person. All the forms of
communal activity in which all persons formerly shared have been taken
over by professionals. The great mass of men in most of the social
activities of modern life are no longer actors, but spectators. The
average man of the present time has been relegated by the influence of
the professional politician to the rôle of taxpayer. In social work
organized charity has come between the giver and the needy.
In these and other manifold ways the artificial conditions of city life
have deprived the person of most of the natural outlets for the
expression of his interests and his energies. To this fact is to be
attributed in large part the restlessness, the thirst for novelty and
excitement so characteristic of modern life. This emotional unrest has
been capitalized by the newspapers, commercialized recreations, fashion,
and agitation in their appeal to the sensations, the emotions, and the
instincts loosened from the satisfying fixations of primary-group life.
The _raison d'être_ of social work, as well as the fundamental problem
of all social institutions in city life must be understood in its
relation to this background.
II. MATERIALS
A. PHYSICAL CONTACT AND SOCIAL CONTACT
1. The Frontiers of Social Contact[121]
Sociology deals especially with the phenomena of _contact_. The
reactions which result from voluntary or involuntary contact of human
beings with other human beings are the phenomena peculiarly "social," as
distinguished from the phenomena that belong properly to biology and
psychology.
In the first place, we want to indicate, not the essence of the social,
but the location, the sphere, the extent, of the social. If we can agree
where it is, we may then proceed to discover what it is. The social,
then, is the term next beyond the individual. Assuming, for the sake of
analysis, that our optical illusion, "the individual," is an isolated
and self-sufficient fact, there are many sorts of scientific problems
that do not need to go beyond this fact to satisfy their particular
terms. Whether the individual can ever be abstracted from his conditions
and remain himself is not a question that we need here discuss. At all
events, the individual known to our experience is not isolated. He is
connected in various ways with one or more individuals. The different
ways in which individuals are connected with each other are indicated by
the inclusive term "contact." Starting, then, from the individual, to
measure him in all his dimensions and to represent him in all his
phases, we find that each person is what he is by virtue of the
existence of other persons, and by virtue of an alternating current of
influence between each person and all the other persons previously or at
the same time in existence. The last native of Central Africa around
whom we throw the dragnet of civilization, and whom we inoculate with a
desire for whiskey, adds an increment to the demand for our distillery
products, and affects the internal revenue of the United States, and so
the life-conditions of every member of our population. This is what we
mean by "contact." So long as that African tribe is unknown to the
outside world, and the world to it, so far as the European world is
concerned, the tribe might as well not exist. The moment the tribe comes
within touch of the rest of the world, the aggregate of the world's
contacts is by so much enlarged; the social world is by so much
extended. In other words, the realm of the social is the realm of
circuits of reciprocal influence between individuals and the groups
which individuals compose. The general term "contact" is proposed to
stand for this realm, because it is a colorless word that may mark
boundaries without prejudging contents. Wherever there is physical or
spiritual contact between persons, there is inevitably a circuit of
exchange of influence. The realm of the social is the realm constituted
by such exchange. It extends from the producing of the baby by the
mother, and the simultaneous producing of the mother by the baby, to the
producing of merchant and soldier by the world-powers, and the producing
of the world-powers by merchant and soldier.
The most general and inclusive way in which to designate all the
phenomena that sociology proper considers, without importing into the
term premature hypotheses by way of explanation, is to assert that they
are the phenomena of "contact" between persons.
In accordance with what was said about the division of labor between
psychology and sociology, it seems best to leave to the psychologist all
that goes on inside the individual and to say that the work of the
sociologist begins with the things that take place between individuals.
This principle of division is not one that can be maintained absolutely,
any more than we can hold absolutely to any other abstract
classification of real actions. It serves, however, certain rough uses.
Our work as students of society begins in earnest when the individual
has become equipped with his individuality. This stage of human growth
is both cause and effect of the life of human beings side by side in
greater or lesser numbers. Under those circumstances individuals are
produced; they act as individuals; by their action as individuals they
produce a certain type of society; that type reacts on the individuals
and helps to transform them into different types of individuals, who in
turn produce a modified type of society; and so the rhythm goes on
forever. Now the medium through which all this occurs is the fact of
contacts, either physical or spiritual. In either case, contacts are
collisions of interests in the individuals.
2. The Land and the People[122]
Every clan, tribe, state, or nation includes two ideas, a people and its
land, the first unthinkable without the other. History, sociology,
ethnology, touch only the inhabited areas of the earth. These areas gain
their final significance because of the people who occupy them; their
local conditions of climate, soil, natural resources, physical features,
and geographic situation are important primarily as factors in the
development of actual or possible inhabitants. A land is fully
comprehended only when studied in the light of its influence upon its
people, and a people cannot be understood apart from the field of its
activities. More than this, human activities are fully intelligible only
in relation to the various geographic conditions which have stimulated
them in different parts of the world. The principles of the evolution of
navigation, of agriculture, of trade, as also the theory of population,
can never reach their correct and final statement, unless the data for
the conclusions are drawn from every part of the world and each fact
interpreted in the light of the local conditions whence it sprang.
Therefore anthropology, sociology, and history should be permeated by
geography.
Most systems of sociology treat man as if he were in some way detached
from the earth's surface; they ignore the land basis of society. The
anthropogeographer recognizes the various social forces, economic and
psychologic, which sociologists regard as the cement of societies; but
he has something to add. He sees in the land occupied by a primitive
tribe or a highly organized state the underlying material bond holding
society together, the ultimate basis of their fundamental social
activities, which are therefore derivatives from the land. He sees the
common territory exercising an integrating force--weak in primitive
communities where the group has established only a few slight and
temporary relations with its soil, so that this low social complex
breaks up readily like its organic counterpart, the low animal organism
found in an amoeba; he sees it growing stronger with every advance in
civilization involving more complex relations to the land--with settled
habitations, with increased density of population, with a discriminating
and highly differentiated use of the soil, with the exploitation of
mineral resources, and, finally, with that far-reaching exchange of
commodities and ideas which means the establishment of varied
extra-territorial relations. Finally, the modern society or state has
grown into every foot of its own soil, exploited its every geographic
advantage, utilized its geographic location to enrich itself by
international trade, and, when possible, to absorb outlying territories
by means of colonies. The broader this geographic base, the richer, more
varied, its resources, and the more favorable its climate to their
exploitation, the more numerous and complex are the connections which
the members of a social group can establish with it, and through it with
each other; or, in other words, the greater may be its ultimate
historical significance.
3. Touch and Social Contact[123]
General ideas concerning human relations are the medium through which
sexual taboo works, and these must now be examined. If we compare the
facts of social taboo generally, or of its subdivision, sexual taboo, we
find that the ultimate test of human relations, in both _genus_ and
_species_, is _contact_. An investigation of primitive ideas concerning
the relations of man with man, when guided by this clue, will lay bare
the principles which underlie the theory and practice of sexual taboo.
Arising, as we have seen, from sexual differentiation, and forced into
permanence by difference of occupation and sexual solidarity, this
segregation receives the continuous support of religious conceptions as
to human relations. These conceptions center upon contact, and ideas of
contact are at the root of all conceptions of human relations at any
stage of culture; contact is the one universal test, as it is the most
elementary form, of mutual relations. Psychology bears this out, and the
point is psychological rather than ethnological.
As I have pointed out before and shall have occasion to do so again, a
comparative examination, assisted by psychology, of the emotions and
ideas of average modern humanity is a most valuable aid to ethnological
inquiry. In this connection, we find that desire or willingness for
physical contact is an animal emotion, more or less subconscious, which
is characteristic of similarity, harmony, friendship, or love.
Throughout the world, the greeting of a friend is expressed by contact,
whether it be nose-rubbing, or the kiss, the embrace, or the clasp of
hands; so the ordinary expression of friendship by a boy, that eternal
savage, is contact of arm and shoulder. More interesting still for our
purpose is the universal expression by contact of the emotion of love.
To touch his mistress is the ever-present desire of the lover, and in
this impulse, even if we do not trace it back, as we may without being
fanciful, to polar or sexual attraction inherent in the atoms, the
[Greek: philia] of Empedocles, yet we may place the beginning and ending
of love. When analyzed, the emotion always comes back to contact.
Further, mere willingness for contact is found universally when the
person to be touched is healthy, if not clean, or where he is of the
same age or class or caste, and, we may add, for ordinary humanity the
same sex.
On the other hand, the avoidance of contact, whether consciously or
subconsciously presented, is no less the universal characteristic of
human relations where similarity, harmony, friendship, or love is
absent. This appears in the attitude of men to the sick, to strangers,
distant acquaintances, enemies, and in cases of difference of age,
position, sympathies or aims, and even of sex. Popular language is full
of phrases which illustrate this feeling.
Again, the pathology of the emotions supplies many curious cases where
the whole being seems concentrated upon the sense of touch, with
abnormal desire or disgust for contact; and in the evolution of the
emotions from physiological pleasure and pain, contact plays an
important part in connection with functional satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with the environment.
In the next place, there are the facts, first, that an element of
thought inheres in all sensation, while sensation conditions thought;
and secondly, that there is a close connection of all the senses, both
in origin--each of them being a modification of the one primary sense of
touch--and in subsequent development, where the specialized organs are
still co-ordinated through tactile sensation, in the sensitive surface
of organism. Again, and here we see the genesis of ideas of contact, it
is by means of the tactile sensibility of the skin and membranes of
sense-organs, forming a sensitized as well as a protecting surface, that
the nervous system conveys to the brain information about the external
world, and this information is in its original aspect the response to
impact. Primitive physics, no less than modern, recognizes that contact
is a modified form of a blow. These considerations show that contact not
only plays an important part in the life of the soul but must have had a
profound influence on the development of ideas, and it may now be
assumed that ideas of contact have been a universal and original
constant factor in human relations and that they are so still. The
latter assumption is to be stressed, because we find that the ideas
which lie beneath primitive taboo are still a vital part of human
nature, though mostly emptied of their religious content; and also
because, as I hold, ceremonies and etiquette, such as still obtain,
could not possess such vitality as they do unless there were a living
psychological force behind them, such as we find in elementary ideas
which come straight from functional processes.
These ideas of contact are _primitive_ in each sense of the word, at
whatever stage of culture they appear. They seem to go back in origin
and in character to that highly developed sensibility of all animal and
even organized life, which forms at once a biological monitor and a
safeguard for the whole organism in relation to its environment. From
this sensibility there arise subjective ideas concerning the safety or
danger of the environment, and in man we may suppose these subjective
ideas as to his environment, and especially as to his fellow-men, to be
the origin of his various expressions of avoidance or desire for
contact.
Lastly, it is to be observed that avoidance of contact is the most
conspicuous phenomenon attaching to cases of taboo when its dangerous
character is prominent. In taboo the connotation of "not to be touched"
is the salient point all over the world, even in cases of permanent
taboo such as belongs to Samoan and Maori chiefs, with whom no one dared
come in contact; and so we may infer the same aversion to be potential
in all such relations.
B. SOCIAL CONTACT IN RELATION TO SOLIDARITY AND TO MOBILITY
1. The In-Group and the Out-Group[124]
The conception of "primitive society" which we ought to form is that of
small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the groups is
determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence. The internal
organization of each group corresponds to its size. A group of groups
may have some relation to each other (kin, neighborhood, alliance,
connubium, and commercium) which draws them together and differentiates
them from others. Thus a differentiation arises between ourselves, the
we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups,
out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a relation of peace,
order, law, government, and industry, to each other. Their relation to
all outsiders, or others-groups, is one of war and plunder, except so
far as agreements have modified it. If a group is exogamic, the women in
it were born abroad somewhere. Other foreigners who might be found in it
are adopted persons, guest-friends, and slaves.
The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of
hostility and war toward others-groups are correlative to each other.
The exigencies of war with outsiders are what make peace inside, lest
internal discord should weaken the we-group for war. These exigencies
also make government and law in the in-group, in order to prevent
quarrels and enforce discipline. Thus war and peace have reacted on each
other and developed each other, one within the group, the other in the
intergroup relation. The closer the neighbors, and the stronger they
are, the intenser is the warfare, and then the intenser is the internal
organization and discipline of each. Sentiments are produced to
correspond. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt
for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without--all grow
together, common products of the same situation.
Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which
one's own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled
and rated with reference to it. Folkways correspond to it to cover both
the inner and the outer relation. Each group nourishes its own pride and
vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks
with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only
right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways,
these excite its scorn. Opprobrious epithets are derived from these
differences. "Pig-eater," "cow-eater," "uncircumcised," "jabberers," are
epithets of contempt and abomination.
2. Sympathetic Contacts versus Categoric Contacts[125]
Let us now consider what takes place when two men, mere strangers to one
another, come together. The motive of classification, which I have
considered in another chapter, leads each of them at once to recognize
the approaching object first as living, then as human. The shape and
dress carry the categorizing process yet farther, so that they are
placed in groups, as of this or that tribe or social class, and as these
determinations are made they arouse the appropriate sympathies or
hatreds such as by experience have become associated with the several
categories. Be it observed that these judgments are spontaneous,
instinctive, and unnoticed. They are made so by immemorial education in
the art of contact which man has inherited from the life of the
ancestral beasts and men; they have most likely been in some measure
affirmed by selection, for these determinations as to the nature of the
neighbor were in the lower stages of existence in brute and man of
critical importance, the creatures lived or died according as they
determined well or ill, swiftly or slowly. If we observe what takes
place in our own minds at such meetings we will see that the action in
its immediateness is like that of the eyelids when the eye is
threatened. As we say, it is done before we know it.
With this view as to the conditions of human contact, particularly of
what occurs when men first meet one another, let us glance at what takes
place in near intercourse. We have seen that at the beginning of any
acquaintance the fellow-being is inevitably dealt with in the categoric
way. He is taken as a member of a group, which group is denoted to us by
a few convenient signs; as our acquaintance with a particular person
advances, this category tends to become qualified. Its bounds are pushed
this way and that until they break down. It is to be noted in this
process that the category fights for itself, or we for it, so that the
result of the battle between the immediate truth and the prejudice is
always doubtful. It is here that knowledge, especially that gained by
individual experience, is most helpful. The uninformed man, who begins
to find, on the nearer view of an Israelite, that the fellow is like
himself, holds by his category in the primitive way. The creature _is_ a
Jew, therefore the evidence of kinship must not count. He who is better
informed is, or should be, accustomed to amend his categories. He may,
indeed, remember that he is dealing with a neighbor of the race which
gave us not only Christ, but all the accepted prophets who have shaped
our own course, and his understanding helps to cast down the barriers of
instinctive prejudice.
At the stage of advancing acquaintance where friendship is attained, the
category begins to disappear from our minds. We may, indeed, measure the
advance in this relation by the extent to which it has been broken down.
Looking attentively at our mental situation as regards those whom we
know pretty well, we see that most of them are still, though rather
faintly, classified into groups. While a few of the nearer stand forth
by themselves, all of the nearest to our hearts are absolutely
individualized, so that our judgments of them are made on the basis of
our own motives and what we of ourselves discern. We may use categoric
terms concerning our lovers, spouses, or children, but they have no real
meaning; these persons are to us purely individual, all trace of the
inclusive category has disappeared; they are, in the full sense of the
word, our neighbors, being so near that when we look upon them we see
nothing else, not even ourselves.
Summing up these considerations concerning human contact, it may be said
that the world works by a system of individualities rising in scale as
we advance from the inorganic through the organic series until we find
the summit in man. The condition of all these individuals is that of
isolation; each is necessarily parted from all the others in the realm,
each receiving influences, and, in turn, sending forth its peculiar tide
of influences to those of its own and other kinds. This isolation in the
case of man is singularly great for the reason that he is the only
creature we know in the realm who is so far endowed with consciousness
that he can appreciate his position and know the measure of his
solitude. In the case of all individuals the discernible is only a small
part of what exists. In man the measure of this presentation is, even to
himself, very small, and that which he can readily make evident to his
neighbor is an exceedingly limited part of the real whole. Yet it is on
this slender basis that we must rest our relations with the fellow man
if we are to found them upon knowledge. The imperfection of this method
of ascertaining the fellow-man is well shown by the trifling contents of
the category discriminations we apply to him. While, as has been
suggested, much can be done by those who have gained in knowledge of our
kind by importing understandings into our relations with men, the only
effective way to the betterment of those relations is through the
sympathies.
What can be done by knowledge in helping us to a comprehension of the
fellow-man is at best merely explanatory of his place in the phenomenal
world; of itself it has only scientific value. The advantage of the
sympathetic way of approach is that in this method the neighbor is
accounted for on the supposition that he is ourself in another form, so
we feel for and with him on the instinctive hypothesis that he is
essentially ourself. There can be no question that this method of
looking upon other individualities is likely to lead to many errors. We
see examples of these blunders in all the many grades of the
personifying process, from the savage's worship of a tree or stone to
the civilized man's conception of a human-like god. We see them also in
the attribution to the lower animals of thoughts and feelings which are
necessarily limited to our own kind, but in the case of man the
conception of identity gives a minimum of error and a maximum of truth.
It, indeed, gives a truer result than could possibly be attained by any
scientific inquiries that we could make, or could conceive of being
effectively made, and this for the following reasons.
When, as in the sympathetic state, we feel that the neighbor of our
species is essentially ourself, the tacit assumption is that his needs
and feelings are as like our own as our own states of mind at diverse
times are like one another, so that we might exchange motives with him
without experiencing any great sense of strangeness. What we have in
mind is not the measure of instruction or education, not the class or
station or other adventitious circumstances, but the essential traits of
his being. Now this supposition is entirely valid. All we know of
mankind justifies the statement that, as regards all the qualities and
motives with which the primal sympathies deal, men are remarkably alike.
Their loves, hates, fears, and sorrows are alike in their essentials; so
that the postulate of sympathy that the other man is essentially like
one's self is no idle fancy but an established truth. It not only
embodies the judgment of all men in thought and action but has its
warrant from all the science we can apply to it.
It is easy to see how by means of sympathy we can at once pass the gulf
which separates man from man. All the devices of the ages in the way of
dumb or spoken language fail to win across the void, and leave the two
beings apart; but with a step the sympathetic spirit passes the gulf. In
this strange feature we have the completion of the series of differences
between the inorganic and the organic groups of individualities. In the
lower or non-living isolations there is no reason why the units should
do more than mechanically interact. All their service in the realm can
be best effected by their remaining forever completely apart. But when
we come to the organic series, the units begin to have need of
understanding their neighbors, in order that they may form those
beginnings of the moral order which we find developing among the members
even of the lowliest species. Out of this sympathetic accord arises the
community, which we see in its simple beginnings in the earlier stages
of life; it grows with the advance in the scale of being, and has its
supreme success in man. Human society, the largest of all organic
associations, requires that its units be knit together in certain common
purposes and understandings, and the union can only be made effective by
the ways of sympathy--by the instinctive conviction of essential
kinship.
3. Historical Continuity and Civilization[126]
In matters connected with political and economical institutions we
notice among the natural races very great differences in the sum of
their civilization. Accordingly we have to look among them, not only for
the beginnings of civilization, but for a very great part of its
evolution, and it is equally certain that these differences are to be
referred less to variations in endowment than to great differences in
the conditions of their development. Exchange has also played its part,
and unprejudiced observers have often been more struck in the presence
of facts by agreement than by difference. "It is astonishing," exclaims
Chapman, when considering the customs of the Damaras, "what a similarity
there is in the manners and practices of the human family throughout the
world. Even here, the two different classes of Damaras practice rites in
common with the New Zealanders, such as that of chipping out the front
teeth and cutting off the little finger." It is less astonishing if, as
the same traveler remarks, their agreement with the Bechuanas goes even
farther. Now, since the essence of civilization lies first in the
amassing of experiences, then in the fixity with which these are
retained, and lastly in the capacity to carry them farther or to
increase them, our first question must be, how is it possible to realize
the first fundamental condition of civilization, namely, the amassing a
stock of culture in the form of handiness, knowledge, power, capital? It
has long been agreed that the first step thereto is the transition from
complete dependence upon what Nature freely offers to a conscious
exploitation through man's own labor, especially in agriculture or
cattle-breeding, of such of her fruits as are most important to him.
This transition opens at one stroke all the most remote possibilities of
Nature, but we must always remember at the same time that it is still a
long way from the first step to the height which has now been attained.
The intellect of man and also the intellect of whole races shows a wide
discrepancy in regard to differences of endowment as well as in regard
to the different effects which external circumstances produce upon it.
Especially are there variations in the degree of inward coherence and
therewith of the fixity or duration of the stock of intellect. The want
of coherence, the breaking up of this stock, characterizes the lower
stages of civilization no less than its coherence, its inalienability,
and its power of growth do the higher. We find in low stages a poverty
of tradition which allows these races neither to maintain a
consciousness of their earlier fortunes for any appreciable period nor
to fortify and increase their stock of intelligence either through the
acquisitions of individual prominent minds or through the adoption and
fostering of any stimulus. Here, if we are not entirely mistaken, is the
basis of the deepest-seated differences between races. The opposition of
historic and non-historic races seems to border closely upon it.
There is a distinction between the quickly ripening immaturity of the
child and the limited maturity of the adult who has come to a stop in
many respects. What we mean by "natural" races is something much more
like the latter than the former. We call them races deficient in
civilization, because internal and external conditions have hindered
them from attaining to such permanent developments in the domain of
culture as form the mark of the true civilized races and the guaranties
of progress. Yet we should not venture to call any of them cultureless,
so long as none of them is devoid of the primitive means by which the
ascent to higher stages can be made--language, religion, fire, weapons,
implements; while the very possession of these means, and many others,
such as domestic animals and cultivated plants, testifies to varied and
numerous dealings with those races which are completely civilized.
The reasons why they do not make use of these gifts are of many kinds.
Lower intellectual endowment is often placed in the first rank. That is
a convenient but not quite fair explanation. Among the savage races of
today we find great differences in endowments. We need not dispute that
in the course of development races of even slightly higher endowments
have got possession of more and more means of culture, and gained
steadiness and security for their progress, while the less endowed
remained behind. But external conditions, in respect to their furthering
or hindering effects, can be more clearly recognized and estimated; and
it is juster and more logical to name them first. We can conceive why
the habitations of the savage races are principally to be found on the
extreme borders of the inhabited world, in the cold and hot regions, in
remote islands, in secluded mountains, in deserts. We understand their
backward condition in parts of the earth which offer so few facilities
for agriculture and cattle-breeding as Australia, the Arctic regions, or
the extreme north and south of America. In the insecurity of
incompletely developed resources we can see the chain which hangs
heavily on their feet and confines their movements within a narrow
space. As a consequence their numbers are small, and from this again
results the small total amount of intellectual and physical
accomplishment, the rarity of eminent men, the absence of the salutary
pressure exercised by surrounding masses on the activity and forethought
of the individual, which operates in the division of society into
classes, and the promotion of a wholesome division of labor. A partial
consequence of this insecurity of resources is the instability of
natural races. A nomadic strain runs through them all, rendering easier
to them the utter incompleteness of their unstable political and
economical institutions, even when an indolent agriculture seems to tie
them to the soil. Thus it often comes about that, in spite of abundantly
provided and well-tended means of culture, their life is desultory,
wasteful of power, unfruitful. This life has no inward consistency, no
secure growth; it is not the life in which the germs of civilization
first grew up to the grandeur in which we frequently find them at the
beginnings of what we call history. It is full rather of fallings-away
from civilization and dim memories from civilized spheres which in many
cases must have existed long before the commencement of history as we
have it.
By the word "civilization" or "culture" we denote usually the sum of all
the acquirements at a given time of the human intelligence. When we
speak of stages, of higher and lower, of semi-civilization, of civilized
and "natural" races, we apply to the various civilizations of the earth
a standard which we take from the degree that we have ourselves
attained. Civilization means _our_ civilization.
The confinement, in space as in time, which isolates huts, villages,
races, no less than successive generations, involves the negation of
culture; in its opposite, the intercourse of contemporaries and the
interdependence of ancestors and successors, lies the possibility of
development. The union of contemporaries secures the retention of
culture, the linking of generations its unfolding. The development of
civilization is a process of hoarding. The hoards grow of themselves so
soon as a retaining power watches over them. In all domains of human
creation and operation we shall see the basis of all higher development
in intercourse. Only through co-operation and mutual help, whether
between contemporaries, whether from one generation to another, has
mankind succeeded in climbing to the stage of civilization on which its
highest members now stand. On the nature and extent of this intercourse
the growth depends. Thus the numerous small assemblages of equal
importance, formed by the family stocks, in which the individual had no
freedom, were less favorable to it than the larger communities and
states of the modern world, with their encouragement to individual
competition.
4. Mobility and the Movement of Peoples[127]
Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of
successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received
various intruding peoples, from the Roman occupation to the recent
influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several
elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men
and "round barrow" men by archaeologists and the identification of a
surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their
recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all
that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an
effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement--growth,
expansion, and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion,
or absorption by another invader. To this constant shifting of races and
peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it
underlies most of written history and constitutes the major part of
unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes.
Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It
involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game or
following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking
more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms
and especially is differentiated for different members of the social
group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiers--men, armies,
explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a
part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion,
while the mass of the population converts the force once expended in the
migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox.
The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases
its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens
its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges
its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a
growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without,
which attaches, however, to certain classes of society, not to the
entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a
whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political
ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in
the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of
commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization till this
movement of peoples becomes a fundamental fact of history.
Otis Mason finds that the life of a social group involves a variety of
movements characterized by different ranges or scopes: (1) The daily
round from bed to bed. (2) The annual round from year to year, like that
of the Tunguse Orochon of Siberia who, in pursuit of various fish and
game, change their residence within their territory from month to month,
or the pastoral nomads who move with the seasons from pasture to
pasture. (3) Less systematic outside movements covering the tribal
sphere of influence, such as journeys or voyages to remote hunting or
fishing grounds, forays or piratical descents upon neighboring lands,
eventuating usually in conquest, expansion into border regions for
occasional occupation, or colonization. (4) Participation in streams of
barter or commerce. (5) And, at a higher stage, in the great currents of
human intercourse, experience, and ideas, which finally compass the
world. In all this series the narrower movement prepares for the
broader, of which it constitutes at once an impulse and a part.
Civilized man is at once more and less mobile than his primitive
brother. Every advance in civilization multiplies and tightens the bonds
uniting him with his soil, makes him a sedentary instead of a migratory
being. On the other hand, every advance in civilization is attended by
the rapid clearing of the forests, by the construction of bridges and
interlacing roads, the invention of more effective vehicles for
transportation whereby intercourse increases, and the improvement of
navigation to the same end. Civilized man progressively modifies the
land which he occupies, removes or reduces obstacles to intercourse, and
thereby approximates it to the open plain. Thus far he facilitates
movements. But while doing this he also places upon the land a dense
population, closely attached to the soil, strong to resist incursion,
and for economic reasons inhospitable to any marked accession of
population from without. Herein lies the great difference between
migration in empty or sparsely inhabited regions, such as predominated
when the world was young, and in the densely populated countries of our
era. As the earth grew old and humanity multiplied, peoples themselves
became the greatest barriers to any massive migrations, till in certain
countries of Europe and Asia the historical movement has been reduced to
a continual pressure, resulting in compression of population here,
repression there. Hence, though political boundaries may shift, ethnic
boundaries scarcely budge. The greatest wars of modern Europe have
hardly left a trace upon the distribution of its peoples. Only in the
Balkan Peninsula, as the frontiers of the Turkish Empire have been
forced back from the Danube, the alien Turks have withdrawn to the
shrinking territory of the Sultan and especially to Asia Minor.
Where a population too great to be dislodged occupies the land, conquest
results in the eventual absorption of the victors and their civilization
by the native folk, as happened to the Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in
Africa, and the Normans in England. Where the invaders are markedly
superior in culture, though numerically weak, conquest results in the
gradual permeation of the conquered with the religion, economic methods,
language, and customs of the newcomers. The latter process, too, is
always attended by some intermixture of blood, where no race repulsion
exists, but this is small in comparison to the diffusion of
civilization. This was the method by which Greek traders and colonists
Hellenized the countries about the eastern Mediterranean and spread
their culture far back from the shores which their settlements had
appropriated. In this way Saracen armies, soon after the death of
Mohammed, Arabized the whole eastern and southern sides of the
Mediterranean from Syria to Spain, and Arab merchants set the stamp of
their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa as far as
Mozambique. The handful of Spanish adventurers who came upon the
relatively dense populations of Mexico and Peru left among them a
civilization essentially European, but only a thin strain of Castilian
blood. Thus the immigration of small bands of people sufficed to
influence the culture of that big territory known as Latin America.
Throughout the life of any people, from its fetal period in some small
locality to its well-rounded adult era marked by the occupation and
organization of a wide national territory, gradations in area mark
gradations of development. And this is true, whether we consider the
compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime
ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their
territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and
human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in
the lower stages of civilization have contracted spatial ideas, desire
and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may
change that territory often; they think in small linear terms, have a
small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of
influence, only tribal sympathies; they have an exaggerated conception
of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is
fatally limited. With a mature, widespread people like the English or
French, all this is different; they have made the earth their own, so
far as possible.
Just because of this universal tendency toward the occupation of ever
larger areas and the formation of vaster political aggregates, in making
a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should
never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national
characteristics which operate toward the absorption of more land and
impel to political expansion are of fundamental value. A ship of state
manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world.
Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension of the circle
of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea
fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries,
and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through
fortuitous or systematic exploration.
C. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY CONTACTS
1. Village Life in America (from the Diary of a Young Girl)[128]
_November 21, 1852._--I am ten years old today, and I think I will write
a journal and tell who I am and what I am doing. I have lived with my
Grandfather and Grandmother Beals ever since I was seven years old, and
Anna, too, since she was four. Our brothers, James and John, came too,
but they are at East Bloomfield at Mr. Stephen Clark's Academy. Miss
Laura Clark of Naples is their teacher.
Anna and I go to school at District No. 11. Mr. James C. Cross is our
teacher, and some of the scholars say he is cross by name and cross by
nature, but I like him. He gave me a book by the name of _Noble Deeds of
American Women_, for reward of merit, in my reading class.
_Friday._--Grandmother says I will have a great deal to answer for,
because Anna looks up to me so and tries to do everything that I do and
thinks whatever I say is "gospel truth." The other day the girls at
school were disputing with her about something and she said, "It is so,
if it ain't so, for Calline said so." I shall have to "toe the mark," as
Grandfather says, if she keeps watch of me all the time and walks in my
footsteps.
_April 1, 1853._--Before I go to school every morning I read three
chapters in the Bible. I read three every day and five on Sunday and
that takes me through the Bible in a year. Those I read this morning
were the first, second, and third chapters of Job. The first was about
Eliphaz reproveth Job; second, benefit of God's correction; third, Job
justifieth his complaint. I then learned a text to say at school. I went
to school at quarter to nine and recited my text and we had prayers and
then proceeded with the business of the day. Just before school was out,
we recited in _Science of Things Familiar_, and in Dictionary, and then
we had calisthenics.
_July._--Hiram Goodrich, who lives at Mr. Myron H. Clark's, and George
and Wirt Wheeler ran away on Sunday to seek their fortunes. When they
did not come back everyone was frightened and started out to find them.
They set out right after Sunday school, taking their pennies which had
been given them for the contribution, and were gone several days. They
were finally found at Palmyra. When asked why they had run away, one
replied that he thought it was about time they saw something of the
world. We heard that Mr. Clark had a few moments' private conversation
with Hiram in the barn and Mr. Wheeler the same with his boys and we do
not think they will go traveling on their own hook again right off. Miss
Upham lives right across the street from them and she was telling little
Morris Bates that he must fight the good fight of faith and he asked her
if that was the fight that Wirt Wheeler fit. She probably had to make
her instructions plainer after that.
_1854, Sunday._--Mr. Daggett's text this morning was the twenty-second
chapter of Revelation, sixteenth verse, "I am the root and offspring of
David and the bright and morning star." Mrs. Judge Taylor taught our
Sunday-school class today and she said we ought not to read our
Sunday-school books on Sunday. I always do. Mine today was entitled,
_Cheap Repository Tracts by Hannah More_, and it did not seem
unreligious at all.
_Tuesday._--Mrs. Judge Taylor sent for me to come over to see her today.
I didn't know what she wanted, but when I got there she said she wanted
to talk and pray with me on the subject of religion. She took me into
one of the wings. I never had been in there before and was frightened at
first, but it was nice after I got used to it. After she prayed, she
asked me to, but I couldn't think of anything but "Now I lay me down to
sleep," and I was afraid she would not like that, so I didn't say
anything. When I got home and told Anna, she said, "Caroline, I presume
probably Mrs. Taylor wants you to be a missionary, but I shan't let you
go." I told her she needn't worry for I would have to stay at home and
look after her. After school tonight I went out into Abbie Clark's
garden with her and she taught me how to play "mumble te peg." It is
fun, but rather dangerous. I am afraid Grandmother won't give me a knife
to play with. Abbie Clark has beautiful pansies in her garden and gave
me some roots.
_Sunday._--I almost forgot that it was Sunday this morning and talked
and laughed just as I do week days. Grandmother told me to write down
this verse before I went to church so I would remember it: "Keep thy
foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than
to offer the sacrifice of fools." I will remember it now, sure. My feet
are all right anyway with my new patten leather shoes on, but I shall
have to look out for my head. Mr. Thomas Howell read a sermon today as
Mr. Daggett is out of town. Grandmother always comes upstairs to get the
candle and tuck us in before she goes to bed herself, and some nights we
are sound asleep and do not hear her, but last night we only pretended
to be asleep. She kneeled down by the bed and prayed aloud for us, that
we might be good children and that she might have strength given her
from on high to guide us in the straight and narrow path which leads to
life eternal. Those were her very words. After she had gone downstairs
we sat up in bed and talked about it and promised each other to be good,
and crossed our hearts and "hoped to die," if we broke our promise. Then
Anna was afraid we would die, but I told her I didn't believe we would
be as good as that, so we kissed each other and went to sleep.
_Sunday._--Rev. Mr. Tousley preached today to the children and told us
how many steps it took to be bad. I think he said lying was first, then
disobedience to parents, breaking the Sabbath, swearing, stealing,
drunkenness. I don't remember just the order they came. It was very
interesting, for he told lots of stories and we sang a great many times.
I should think Eddy Tousley would be an awful good boy with his father
in the house with him all the while, but probably he has to be away part
of the time preaching to other children.
_December 20, 1855._--Susan B. Anthony is in town and spoke in Bemis
Hall this afternoon. She made a special request that all the seminary
girls should come to hear her as well as all the women and girls in
town. She had a large audience and she talked very plainly about our
rights and how we ought to stand up for them, and said the world would
never go right until the women had just as much right to vote and rule
as the men. She asked us all to come up and sign our names who would
promise to do all in our power to bring about that glad day when equal
rights would be the law of the land. A whole lot of us went up and
signed the paper. When I told Grandmother about it she said she guessed
Susan B. Anthony had forgotten that St. Paul said the women should keep
silence. I told her no, she didn't, for she spoke particularly about St.
Paul and said if he had lived in these times, instead of eighteen
hundred years ago, he would have been as anxious to have the women at
the head of the government as she was. I could not make Grandmother
agree with her at all and she said we might better all of us stayed at
home. We went to prayer meeting this evening and a woman got up and
talked. Her name was Mrs. Sands. We hurried home and told Grandmother
and she said she probably meant all right and she hoped we did not
laugh.
_February 21, 1856._--We had a very nice time at Fannie Gaylord's party
and a splendid supper. Lucilla Field laughed herself almost to pieces
when she found on going home that she had worn her leggins all the
evening. We had a pleasant walk home but did not stay till it was out.
Someone asked me if I danced every set and I told them no, I set every
dance. I told Grandmother and she was very much pleased. Some one told
us that Grandfather and Grandmother first met at a ball in the early
settlement of Canandaigua. I asked her if it was so and she said she
never danced since she became a professing Christian and that was more
than fifty years ago.
_May, 1856._--We were invited to Bessie Seymour's party last night and
Grandmother said we could go. The girls all told us at school that they
were going to wear low neck and short sleeves. We have caps on the
sleeves of our best dresses and we tried to get the sleeves out, so we
could go bare arms, but we couldn't get them out. We had a very nice
time, though, at the party. Some of the Academy boys were there and they
asked us to dance but of course we couldn't do that. We promenaded
around the rooms and went out to supper with them. Eugene Stone and Tom
Eddy asked to go home with us but Grandmother sent our two girls for us,
Bridget Flynn and Hannah White, so they couldn't. We were quite
disappointed, but perhaps she won't send for us next time.
_Thursday, 1857._--We have four sperm candles in four silver
candlesticks and when we have company we light them. Johnnie Thompson,
son of the minister, Rev. M. L. R. P., has come to the academy to school
and he is very full of fun and got acquainted with all the girls very
quick. He told us this afternoon to have "the other candle lit" for he
was coming down to see us this evening. Will Schley heard him say it and
he said he was coming too. _Later._--The boys came and we had a very
pleasant evening but when the 9 o'clock bell rang we heard Grandfather
winding up the clock and scraping up the ashes on the hearth to cover
the fire so it would last till morning and we all understood the signal
and they bade us good night. "We won't go home till morning" is a song
that will never be sung in this house.
_September, 1857._--Grandmother let Anna have six little girls here to
supper to-night: Louisa Field, Hattie Paddock, Helen Coy, Martha
Densmore, Emma Wheeler, and Alice Jewett. We had a splendid supper and
then we played cards. I do not mean regular cards, mercy no! Grandfather
thinks those kinds are contageous or outrageous or something dreadful
and never keeps them in the house. Grandmother said they found a pack
once, when the hired man's room was cleaned, and they went into the fire
pretty quick. The kind we played was just "Dr. Busby," and another "The
Old Soldier and His Dog." There are counters with them, and if you don't
have the card called for you have to pay one into the pool. It is real
fun. They all said they had a very nice time, indeed, when they bade
Grandmother good night, and said: "Mrs. Beals, you must let Carrie and
Anna come and see us some time," and she said she would. I think it is
nice to have company.
_August 30, 1858._--Some one told us that when Bob and Henry Antes were
small boys they thought they would like to try, just for once, to see
how it would seem to be bad, so in spite of all of Mr. Tousley's sermons
they went out behind the barn one day and in a whisper Bob said, "I
swear," and Henry said, "So do I." Then they came into the house
looking guilty and quite surprised, I suppose, that they were not struck
dead just as Ananias and Sapphira were for lying.
_February, 1859._--Mary Wheeler came over and pierced my ears today, so
I can wear my new earrings that Uncle Edward sent me. She pinched my ear
until it was numb and then pulled a needle through, threaded with silk.
Anna would not stay in the room. She wants hers done but does not dare.
It is all the fashion for girls to cut off their hair and friz it. Anna
and I have cut off ours and Bessie Seymour got me to cut off her lovely
long hair today. It won't be very comfortable for us to sleep with curl
papers all over our heads, but we must do it now. I wanted my new dress
waist which Miss Rosewarne is making to hook up in front, but
Grandmother said I would have to wear it that way all the rest of my
life so I had better be content to hook it in the back a little longer.
She said when Aunt Glorianna was married, in 1848, it was the fashion
for grown-up women to have their waists fastened in the back, so the
bride had hers made that way but she thought it was a very foolish and
inconvenient fashion. It is nice, though, to dress in style and look
like other people. I have a Garibaldi waist and a Zouave jacket and a
balmoral skirt.
_1860, Sunday._--Frankie Richardson asked me to go with her to teach a
class in the colored Sunday School on Chapel Street this afternoon. I
asked Grandmother if I could go and she said she never noticed that I
was particularly interested in the colored race and she said she thought
I only wanted an excuse to get out for a walk Sunday afternoon. However,
she said I could go just this once. When we got up as far as the
Academy, Mr. Noah T. Clarke's brother, who is one of the teachers, came
out and Frank said he led the singing at the Sunday school and she said
she would give me an introduction to him, so he walked up with us and
home again. Grandmother said that when she saw him opening the gate for
me, she understood my zeal in missionary work. "The dear little lady,"
as we often call her, has always been noted for her keen discernment and
wonderful sagacity and loses none of it as she advances in years. Some
one asked Anna the other day if her Grandmother retained all her
faculties and Anna said, "Yes, indeed, to an alarming degree."
Grandmother knows that we think she is a perfect angel even if she does
seem rather strict sometimes. Whether we are seven or seventeen we are
children to her just the same, and the Bible says, "Children obey your
parents in the Lord for this is right." We are glad that we never will
seem old to her. I had the same company home from church in the evening.
His home is in Naples.
_Christmas, 1860._--I asked Grandmother if Mr. Clarke could take Sunday
night supper with us and she said she was afraid he did not know the
catechism. I asked him Friday night and he said he would learn it on
Saturday so that he could answer every third question anyway. So he did
and got along very well. I think he deserves a pretty good supper.
2. Secondary Contacts and City Life[129]
Modern methods of urban transportation and communication--the electric
railway, the automobile, and the telephone--have silently and rapidly
changed in recent years the social and industrial organization of the
modern city. They have been the means of concentrating traffic in the
business districts; have changed the whole character of retail trade,
multiplying the residence suburbs and making the department store
possible. These changes in the industrial organization and in the
distribution of population have been accompanied by corresponding
changes in the habits, sentiments, and character of the urban
population.
The general nature of these changes is indicated by the fact that the
growth of cities has been accompanied by the substitution of indirect,
"secondary," for direct, face-to-face, "primary" relations in the
associations of individuals in the community.
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate
face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in
several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in
forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The
result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain
fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very
self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and
purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing
this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the
sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is
the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole
and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.
Touch and sight, physical contact, are the basis for the first and most
elementary human relationships. Mother and child, husband and wife,
father and son, master and servant, kinsman and neighbor, minister,
physician, and teacher--these are the most intimate and real
relationships of life and in the small community they are practically
inclusive.
The interactions which take place among the members of a community so
constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on
largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control
arises, for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal
influences and public sentiment. It is the result of a personal
accommodation rather than the formulation of a rational and abstract
principle.
In a great city, where the population is unstable, where parents and
children are employed out of the house and often in distant parts of the
city, where thousands of people live side by side for years without so
much as a bowing acquaintance, these intimate relationships of the
primary group are weakened and the moral order which rested upon them is
gradually dissolved.
Under the disintegrating influences of city life most of our traditional
institutions, the church, the school, and the family, have been greatly
modified. The school, for example, has taken over some of the functions
of the family. It is around the public school and its solicitude for the
moral and physical welfare of the children that something like a new
neighborhood and community spirit tends to get itself organized.
The church, on the other hand, which has lost much of its influence
since the printed page has so largely taken the place of the pulpit in
the interpretation of life, seems at present to be in process of
readjustment to the new conditions.
It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening
of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the
influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for
the increase of vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting
in this connection to determine by investigation how far the increase in
crime keeps pace with the increasing mobility of the population. It is
from this point of view that we should seek to interpret all those
statistics which register the disintegration of the moral order, for
example, the statistics of divorce, of truancy, and of crime.
Great cities have always been the melting-pots of races and of cultures.
Out of the vivid and subtle interactions of which they have been the
centers, there have come the newer breeds and the newer social types.
The great cities of the United States, for example, have drawn from the
isolation of their native villages great masses of the rural populations
of Europe and America. Under the shock of the new contacts the latent
energies of these primitive peoples have been released, and the subtler
processes of interaction have brought into existence not merely
vocational but temperamental types.
Transportation and communication have effected, among many other silent
but far-reaching changes, what I have called the "mobilization of the
individual man." They have multiplied the opportunities of the
individual man for contact and for association with his fellows, but
they have made these contacts and associations more transitory and less
stable. A very large part of the populations of great cities, including
those who make their homes in tenements and apartment houses, live much
as people do in some great hotel, meeting but not knowing one another.
The effect of this is to substitute fortuitous and casual relationship
for the more intimate and permanent associations of the smaller
community.
Under these circumstances the individual's status is determined to a
considerable degree by conventional signs--by fashion and "front"--and
the art of life is largely reduced to skating on thin surfaces and a
scrupulous study of style and manners.
Not only transportation and communication, but the segregation of the
urban population, tends to facilitate the mobility of the individual
man. The processes of segregation establish moral distances which make
the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not
interpenetrate. This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly
and easily from one moral milieu to another and encourages the
fascinating but dangerous experiment of living at the same time in
several different contiguous, perhaps, but widely separated worlds. All
this tends to give to city life a superficial and adventitious
character; it tends to complicate social relationships and to produce
new and divergent individual types. It introduces, at the same time, an
element of chance and adventure, which adds to the stimulus of city
life and gives it for young and fresh nerves a peculiar attractiveness.
The lure of great cities is perhaps a consequence of stimulations which
act directly upon the reflexes. As a type of human behavior it may be
explained, like the attraction of the flame for the moth, as a sort of
tropism.
The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact
that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied
manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands
and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his
peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate qualities
to full and free expression. It is, I suspect, motives of this kind
which have their basis, not in interest nor even in sentiment, but in
something more fundamental and primitive which draw many, if not most,
of the young men and young women from the security of their homes in the
country into the big, booming confusion and excitement of city life. In
a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or
genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small community often
tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it. Neither
the criminal, the defective, nor the genius has the same opportunity to
develop his innate disposition in a small town that he invariably finds
in a great city.
Fifty years ago every village had one or two eccentric characters who
were treated ordinarily with a benevolent toleration, but who were
regarded meanwhile as impracticable and queer. These exceptional
individuals lived an isolated existence, cut off by their very
eccentricities, whether of genius or of defect, from genuinely intimate
intercourse with their fellows. If they had the making of criminals, the
restraints and inhibitions of the small community rendered them
harmless. If they had the stuff of genius in them, they remained sterile
for lack of appreciation or opportunity. Mark Twain's story of _Pudd'n
Head Wilson_ is a description of one such obscure and unappreciated
genius. It is not so true as it was that--
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its fragrance on the desert air.
Gray wrote the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" before the existence of
the modern city.
In the city many of these divergent types now find a milieu in which for
good or for ill their dispositions and talents parturiate and bear
fruit.
3. Publicity as a Form of Secondary Contact[130]
In contrast with the political machine, which has founded its organized
action on the local, personal, and immediate interests represented by
the different neighborhoods and localities, the good-government
organizations, the bureaus of municipal research, and the like have
sought to represent the interests of the city as a whole and have
appealed to a sentiment and opinion neither local nor personal. These
agencies have sought to secure efficiency and good government by the
education of the voter, that is to say, by investigating and publishing
the facts regarding the government.
In this way publicity has come to be a recognized form of social
control, and advertising--"social advertising"--has become a profession
with an elaborate technique supported by a body of special knowledge.
It is one of the characteristic phenomena of city life and of society
founded on secondary relationships that advertising should have come to
occupy so important a place in its economy.
In recent years every individual and organization which has had to deal
with the public, that is to say, the public outside the smaller and more
intimate communities of the village and small town, has come to have its
press agent, who is often less an advertising man than a diplomatic man
accredited to the newspapers, and through them to the world at large.
Institutions like the Russell Sage Foundation, and to a less extent the
General Education Board, have sought to influence public opinion
directly through the medium of publicity. The Carnegie Report upon
Medical Education, the Pittsburgh Survey, the Russell Sage Foundation
Report on Comparative Costs of Public-School Education in the Several
States, are something more than scientific reports. They are rather a
high form of journalism, dealing with existing conditions critically,
and seeking through the agency of publicity to bring about radical
reforms. The work of the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York has
had a similar practical purpose. To these must be added the work
accomplished by the child-welfare exhibits, by the social surveys
undertaken in different parts of the country, and by similar propaganda
in favor of public health.
As a source of social control public opinion becomes important in
societies founded on secondary relationships of which great cities are a
type. In the city every social group tends to create its own milieu,
and, as these conditions become fixed, the mores tend to accommodate
themselves to the conditions thus created. In secondary groups and in
the city, fashion tends to take the place of custom, and public opinion
rather than the mores becomes the dominant force in social control.
In any attempt to understand the nature of public opinion and its
relation to social control, it is important to investigate, first of
all, the agencies and devices which have come into practical use in the
effort to control, enlighten, and exploit it.
The first and the most important of these is the press, that is, the
daily newspaper and other forms of current literature, including books
classed as current.
After the newspaper, the bureaus of research which are now springing up
in all the large cities are the most interesting and the most promising
devices for using publicity as a means of control.
The fruits of these investigations do not reach the public directly, but
are disseminated through the medium of the press, the pulpit and other
sources of popular enlightenment.
In addition to these, there are the educational campaigns in the
interest of better health conditions, the child-welfare exhibits, and
the numerous "social advertising" devices which are now employed,
sometimes upon the initiative of private societies, sometimes upon that
of popular magazines or newspapers, in order to educate the public and
enlist the masses of the people in the movement for the improvement of
conditions of community life.
The newspaper is the great medium of communication within the city, and
it is on the basis of the information which it supplies that public
opinion rests. The first function which a newspaper supplies is that
which was formerly performed by the village gossip.
In spite, however, of the industry with which newspapers pursue facts of
personal intelligence and human interest, they cannot compete with the
village gossips as a means of social control. For one thing, the
newspaper maintains some reservations not recognized by gossip, in the
matters of personal intelligence. For example, until they run for office
or commit some other overt act that brings them before the public
conspicuously, the private life of individual men or women is a subject
that is for the newspaper taboo. It is not so with gossip, partly
because in a small community no individual is so obscure that his
private affairs escape observation and discussion; partly because the
field is smaller. In small communities there is a perfectly amazing
amount of personal information afloat among the individuals who compose
them.
The absence of this in the city is what, in large part, makes the city
what it is.
4. From Sentimental to Rational Attitudes[131]
I can imagine it to be of exceeding great interest to write the history
of mankind from the point of view of the stranger and his influence on
the trend of events. From the earliest dawn of history we may observe
how communities developed in special directions, no less in important
than in insignificant things, because of influences from without. Be it
religion or technical inventions, good form in conduct or fashions in
dress, political revolutions or stock-exchange machinery, the impetus
always--or, at least, in many cases--came from strangers. It is not
surprising, therefore, that in the history of the intellectual and
religious growth of the bourgeois the stranger should play no small
part. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages in Europe, and to a large
extent in the centuries that followed, families left their homes to set
up their hearths anew in other lands. The wanderers were in the majority
of cases economic agents with a strongly marked tendency toward
capitalism, and they originated capitalist methods and cultivated them.
Accordingly, it will be helpful to trace the interaction of migrations
and the history of the capitalist spirit.
First, as to the facts themselves. Two sorts of migrations may be
distinguished--those of single individuals and those of groups. In the
first category must be placed the removal, of their own free will, of a
family, or it may even be of a few families, from one district or
country to another. Such cases were universal. But we are chiefly
concerned with those instances in which the capitalist spirit manifested
itself, as we must assume it did where the immigrants were acquainted
with a more complex economic system or were the founders of new
industries. Take as an instance the Lombards and other Italian
merchants, who in the early Middle Ages carried on business in England,
France, and elsewhere. Or recall how in the Middle Ages many an
industry, more especially silk weaving, that was established in any
district was introduced by foreigners, and very often on a capitalist
basis. "A new phase in the development of the Venetian silk industry
began with the arrival of traders and silk-workers from Lucca, whereby
the industry reached its zenith. The commercial element came more and
more to the fore; the merchants became the organizers of production,
providing the master craftsman with raw materials which he worked up."
So we read in Broglio d'Ajano. We are told a similar tale about the silk
industry in Genoa, which received an enormous impetus when the Berolerii
began to employ craftsmen from Lucca. In 1341 what was probably the
first factory for silk manufacture was erected by one Bolognino di
Barghesano, of Lucca. Even in Lyons tradition asserts that Italians
introduced the making of silk, and, when in the sixteenth century the
industry was placed on a capitalist basis, the initiative thereto came
once more from aliens. It was the same in Switzerland, where the silk
industry was introduced by the Pelligari in 1685. In Austria likewise we
hear the same tale.
Silk-making in these instances is but one example; there were very many
others. Here one industry was introduced, there another; here it was by
Frenchmen or Germans, there by Italians or Dutchmen. And always the new
establishments came at the moment when the industries in question were
about to become capitalistic in their organization.
Individual migrations, then, were not without influence on the economic
development of society. But much more powerful was the effect of the
wanderings of large groups from one land to another. From the sixteenth
century onward migrations of this sort may be distinguished under three
heads: (1) Jewish migrations; (2) the migration of persecuted
Christians, more especially of Protestants; and (3) the colonizing
movement, particularly the settlement in America.
We come, then, to the general question, Is it not a fact that the
"stranger," the immigrant, was possessed of a specially developed
capitalist spirit, and this quite apart from his environment, and, to a
lesser degree, his religion or his nationality? We see it in the old
states of Europe no less than in the new settlements beyond; in Jews and
Gentiles alike; in Protestants and Catholics (the French in Louisiana
were, by the middle of the nineteenth century, not a whit behind the
Anglo-Saxons of the New England states in this respect). The assumption
therefore forces itself upon us that this particular social
condition--migration or change of habitat--was responsible for the
unfolding of the capitalist spirit. Let us attempt to show how.
If we are content to find it in a single cause, it would be the breach
with all old ways of life and all old social relationships. Indeed, the
psychology of the stranger in a new land may easily be explained by
reference to this one supreme fact. His clan, his country, his people,
his state, no matter how deeply he was rooted in them, have now ceased
to be realities for him. His first aim is to make profit. How could it
be otherwise? There is nothing else open to him. In the old country he
was excluded from playing his part in public life; in the colony of his
choice there is no public life to speak of. Neither can he devote
himself to a life of comfortable, slothful ease; the new lands have
little comfort. Nor is the newcomer moved by sentiment. His environment
means nothing to him. At best he regards it as a means to an end--to
make a living. All this must surely be of great consequence for the rise
of a mental outlook that cares only for gain; and who will deny that
colonial activity generates it? "Our rivulets and streams turn mill
wheels and bring rafts into the valleys, as they do in Scotland. But not
one ballad, not a single song, reminds us that on their banks men and
women live who experience the happiness of love and the pangs of
separation; that under each roof in the valleys life's joys and sorrows
come and go." This plaint of an American of the old days expresses my
meaning; it has been noted again and again, particularly by those who
visited America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The only
relationship between the Yankee and his environment is one of practical
usefulness. The soil, as one of them says, is not regarded as "the
mother of men, the hearth of the gods, the abiding resting-place of the
past generations, but only as a means to get rich." There is nothing of
"the poetry of the place" anywhere to check commercial devastations. The
spire of his village is for the American like any other spire; in his
eyes the newest and most gaudily painted is the most beautiful. A
waterfall for him merely represents so much motive power. "What a mighty
volume of water!" is, as we are assured, the usual cry of an American on
seeing Niagara for the first time, and his highest praise of it is that
it surpasses all other waterfalls in the world in its horse-power.
Nor has the immigrant or colonial settler a sense of the present or the
past. He has only a future. Before long the possession of money becomes
his one aim and ambition, for it is clear to him that by its means alone
will he be able to shape that future. But how can he amass money? Surely
by enterprise. His being where he is proves that he has capacities, that
he can take risks; is it remarkable, then, that sooner or later his
unbridled acquisitiveness will turn him into a restless capitalist
undertaker? Here again we have cause and effect. He undervalues the
present; he overvalues the future. Hence his activities are such as they
are. Is it too much to say that even today American civilization has
something of the unfinished about it, something that seems as yet to be
in the making, something that turns from the present to the future?
Another characteristic of the newcomer everywhere is that there are no
bounds to his enterprise. He is not held in check by personal
considerations; in all his dealings he comes into contact only with
strangers like himself. As we have already had occasion to point out,
the first profitable trade was carried on with strangers; your own kith
and kin received assistance from you. You lent out money at interest
only to the stranger, as Antonio remarked to Shylock, for from the
stranger you could demand more than you lent.
Nor is the stranger held in check by considerations other than personal
ones. He has no traditions to respect; he is not bound by the policy of
an old business. He begins with a clean slate; he has no local
connections that bind him to any one spot. Is not every locality in a
new country as good as every other? You therefore decide upon the one
that promises most profit. As Poscher says, a man who has risked his all
and left his home to cross the ocean in search of his fortune will not
be likely to shrink from a small speculation if this means a change of
abode. A little traveling more or less can make no difference.
So it comes about that the feverish searching after novelties manifested
itself in the American character quite early. "If to live means constant
movement and the coming and going of thoughts and feelings in quick
succession, then the people here live a hundred lives. All is
circulation, movement, and vibrating life. If one attempt fails, another
follows on its heels, and before every one undertaking has been
completed, the next has already been entered upon" (Chevalier). The
enterprising impulse leads to speculation; and here again early
observers have noticed the national trait. "Everybody speculates and no
commodity escapes from the speculating rage. It is not tulip speculation
this time, but speculations in cottons, real estate, banks, and
railways."
One characteristic of the stranger's activity, be he a settler in a new
or an old land, follows of necessity. I refer to the determination to
apply the utmost rational effort in the field of economic and technical
activity. The stranger must carry through plans with success because of
necessity or because he cannot withstand the desire to secure his
future. On the other hand, he is able to do it more easily than other
folk because he is not hampered by tradition. This explains clearly
enough why alien immigrants, as we have seen, furthered commercial and
industrial progress wherever they came. Similarly we may thus account
for the well-known fact that nowhere are technical inventions so
plentiful as in America, that railway construction and the making of
machinery proceed much more rapidly there than anywhere else in the
world. It all comes from the peculiar conditions of the problem,
conditions that have been termed colonial--great distances, dear labor,
and the will to progress. The state of mind that will have, nay, must
have, progress is that of the stranger, untrammeled by the past and
gazing toward the future.
Yet results such as these are not achieved by strangers merely because
they happen to be strangers. Place a negro in a new environment; will he
build railways and invent labor-saving machines? Hardly. There must be a
certain fitness; it must be in the blood. In short, other forces beside
that of being merely a stranger in a strange land are bound to
co-operate before the total result can be fully accounted for. There
must be a process of selection, making the best types available, and
the ethical and moral factor, too, counts for much. Nevertheless, the
migrations themselves were a very powerful element in the growth of
capitalism.
5. The Sociological Significance of the "Stranger"[132]
If wandering, considered as the liberation from every given point in
space, is the conceptual opposite to fixation at such a point, then
surely the sociological form of "the stranger" presents the union of
both of these specifications. It discloses, indeed, the fact that
relations to space are only, on the one hand, the condition, and, on the
other hand, the symbol, of relations to men. The stranger is not taken
here, therefore, in the sense frequently employed, of the wanderer who
comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather of the man who comes today and
stays tomorrow, the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he
has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and
going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle, but his position
within it is peculiarly determined by the fact that he does not belong
in it from the first, that he brings qualities into it that are not, and
cannot be, native to it.
The union of nearness and remoteness, which every relation between men
comprehends, has here produced a system of relations or a constellation
which may, in the fewest words, be thus formulated: The distance within
the relation signifies that the Near is far; the very fact of being
alien, however, that the Far is near. For the state of being a stranger
is naturally a quite positive relation, a particular form of
interaction. The inhabitants of Sirius are not exactly strangers to us,
at least not in the sociological sense of the word as we are considering
it. In that sense they do not exist for us at all. They are beyond being
far and near. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not
otherwise than the Poor and the various "inner enemies," an element
whose inherent position and membership involve both an exterior and an
opposite. The manner, now, in which mutually repulsive and opposing
elements here compose a form of a joint and interacting unity may now be
briefly analyzed.
In the whole history of economics the stranger makes his appearance
everywhere as the trader, the trader his as the stranger. As long as
production for one's own needs is the general rule, or products are
exchanged within a relatively narrow circle, there is no need of any
middleman within the group. A trader is only required with those
products which are produced entirely outside of the group. Unless there
are people who wander out into foreign lands to buy these necessities,
in which case they are themselves "strange" merchants in this other
region, the trader must be a stranger. No other has a chance for
existence.
This position of the stranger is intensified in our consciousness if,
instead of leaving the place of his activity, he fixes himself in it.
This will be possible for him only if he can live by trade in the rôle
of a middleman. Any closed economic group in which the division of the
land and of the crafts which satisfy the local demands has been achieved
will still grant an existence to the trader. For trade alone makes
possible unlimited combinations, in which intelligence finds ever wider
extensions and ever newer accessions, a thing rarely possible in the
case of the primitive producer with his lesser mobility and his
restriction to a circle of customers which could only very gradually be
increased. Trade can always absorb more men than primary production, and
it is therefore the most favorable province for the stranger, who
thrusts himself, so to speak, as a supernumerary into a group in which
all the economic positions are already possessed. History offers as the
classic illustration the European Jew. The stranger is by his very
nature no landowner--in saying which, land is taken not merely in a
physical sense but also in a metaphorical one of a permanent and a
substantial existence, which is fixed, if not in space, then at least in
an ideal position within the social order. The special sociological
characteristics of the stranger may now be presented.
a) _Mobility._--In the more intimate relations of man to man, the
stranger may disclose all possible attractions and significant
characters, but just as long as he is regarded as a stranger, he is in
so far no landowner. Now restriction to trade, and frequently to pure
finance, as if by a sublimation from the former, gives the stranger the
specific character of mobility. With this mobility, when it occurs
within a limited group, there occurs that synthesis of nearness and
remoteness which constitutes the formal position of the stranger; for
the merely mobile comes incidentally into contact with every single
element but is not bound up organically, through the established ties of
kinship, locality, or profession, with any single one.
b) _Objectivity._--Another expression for this relation lies in the
objectivity of the stranger. Because he is not rooted in the peculiar
attitudes and biased tendencies of the group, he stands apart from all
these with the peculiar attitude of the "objective," which does not
indicate simply a separation and disinterestedness but is a peculiar
composition of nearness and remoteness, concern and indifference. I call
attention to the domineering positions of the stranger to the group, as
whose archtype appeared that practice of Italian cities of calling their
judges from without, because no native was free from the prejudices of
family interests and factions.
c) _Confidant._--With the objectivity of the stranger is connected the
phenomenon which indeed belongs chiefly, but not indeed exclusively, to
the mobile man: namely, that often the most surprising disclosures and
confessions, even to the character of the confessional disclosure, are
brought to him, secrets such as one carefully conceals from every
intimate. Objectivity is by no means lack of sympathy, for that is
something quite outside and beyond either subjective or objective
relations. It is rather a positive and particular manner of sympathy. So
the objectivity of a theoretical observation certainly does not mean
that the spirit is a _tabula rasa_ on which things inscribe their
qualities, but it means the full activity of a spirit working according
to its own laws, under conditions in which accidental dislocations and
accentuations have been excluded, the individual and subjective
peculiarities of which would give quite different pictures of the same
object.
d) _Freedom from convention._--One can define objectivity also as
freedom. The objective man is bound by no sort of proprieties which can
prejudice for him his apprehension, his understanding, his judgment of
the given. This freedom which permits the stranger to experience and
deal with the relation of nearness as though from a bird's-eye view,
contains indeed all sorts of dangerous possibilities. From the
beginnings of things, in revolutions of all sorts, the attacked party
has claimed that there has been incitement from without, through foreign
emissaries and agitators. As far as that is concerned, it is simply an
exaggeration of the specific rôle of the stranger; he is the freer man,
practically and theoretically; he examines the relations with less
prejudice; he submits them to more general, more objective, standards,
and is not confined in his action by custom, piety, or precedents.