(4) ——. "Some Aspects of Competition," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Sec. VII, "Modern Analysis of the Motives of Business Competition," LIII (1890), 634-37. [See also Sec. VIII, "Growing Importance of Public Opinion as an Economic Force," pp. 637-41.]

(5) Menger, Karl. Grundsatze der Volkswirthschaftslehre. Chap. ii, Wien, 1871.

(6) ——. Untersuchungen ueber die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Oekonomie insbesondere. Chap. vii, "Ueber das Dogma," etc. Leipzig, 1883.

(7) Jevons, W. S. The Theory of Political Economy. Chap. ii, "Theory of Pleasure and Pain," pp. 28-36; "The Laws of Human Wants," pp. 39-43. 4th ed. London, 1911.

(8) Bentham, Jeremy. "A Table of the Springs of Action." Showing the several species of pleasures and pains of which man's nature is susceptible; together with the several species of interests, desires and motives respectively corresponding to them; and the several sets of appellatives, neutral, eulogistic, and dyslogistic, by which each species of motive is wont to be designated. [First published in 1817.] The Works of Jeremy Bentham, I, 195-219. London, 1843.

C. Wants and Values

(1) Kreibig, Josef K. Psychologische Grundlegung eines Systems der Wert-Theorie. Wien, 1902.

(2) Simmel, Georg. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der ethischen Grundbegriffe. Vol. I, chap. iv, "Die Glueckseligkeit." 2 vols. Berlin, 1904-05.

(3) Meinong, Alexius. Psychologische-ethische Untersuchungen zur Wert-Theorie. Graz, 1894.

(4) Ehrenfels, Chrn. v. System der Wert-Theorie. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1897-98.

(5) Brentano, Franz. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Chap. vi-ix, pp. 256-350. Leipzig, 1874.

(6) Urban, Wilbur Marshall. Valuation, Its Nature and Laws. Being an introduction to the general theory of value. London, 1909.

(7) Cooley, Charles H. Social Process. Part VI, "Valuation," pp. 283-348. New York, 1918.

IV. SENTIMENTS, ATTITUDES, AND WISHES

(1) White, W. A. Mechanisms of Character Formation. An introduction to psychoanalysis. New York, 1916.

(2) Pfister, Oskar. The Psychoanalytic Method. Translated from the German by Dr. C.R. Payne. New York, 1917.

(3) Jung, Carl G. Analytical Psychology. Translated from the German by Dr. Constance E. Long. New York, 1916.

(4) Adler, Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution. Outlines of a comparative individualistic psychology and psychotherapy. Translated from the German by Bernard Glueck. New York, 1917.

(5) Freud, Sigmund. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York, 1920.

(6) Tridon, Andre. Psychoanalysis and Behavior. New York, 1920.

(7) Holt, Edwin B. The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics. New York, 1915.

(8) Mercier, C.A. Conduct and Its Disorders Biologically Considered. London, 1911.

(9) Bechterew, W. v. La psychologie objective. Translated from the Russian. Paris, 1913.

(10) Kostyleff, N. Le mecanisme cerebral de la pensee. Paris, 1914.

(11) Bentley, A. F. The Process of Government. A study of social pressures. Chicago, 1908.

(12) Veblen, T. The Theory of the Leisure Class. An economic study in the evolution of institutions. New York, 1899. [Discusses the wish for recognition.]

(13) ——. The Instinct of Workmanship. And the state of the industrial arts. New York, 1914. [Discusses the wish for recognition.]

(14) McDougall, William. An Introduction to Social Psychology. Chaps. v-vi, pp. 121-73. 13th ed. Boston, 1918.

(15) Shand, A. F. "Character and the Emotions," Mind., n. s., V (1896), 203-26.

(16) ——. "M. Ribot's Theory of the Passions," Mind., n. s., XVI (1907), 477-505.

(17) ——. The Foundations of Character. Being a study of the tendencies of the emotions and sentiments. Chaps. iv-v, "The Systems of the Sentiments," pp. 35-63. London, 1914.

(18) Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. III, 5-81. Boston, 1919.

TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES

1. The Concept of Forces in the Natural Sciences.

2. Historical Interpretation and Social Forces.

3. The Concept of Social Forces in Recent Studies of the Local Community.

4. Institutions as Social Forces: The Church, the Press, the School, etc.

5. Institutions as Organizations of Social Forces: Analysis of a Typical Institution, Its Organization, Dominant Personalities, etc.

6. Persons as Social Forces: Analysis of the Motives determining the Behavior of a Dominant Personality in a Typical Social Group.

7. Group Opinion as a Social Force.

8. Tendencies, Trends, and the Spirit of the Age.

9. History of the Concepts of Attitudes, Sentiments, and Wishes as Defined in Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology.

10. Attitudes as the Organizations of Wishes.

11. The Freudian Wish.

12. Personal and Social Disorganization from the Standpoint of the Four Wishes.

13. The Law of the Four Wishes: All the Wishes Must Be Realized. A Wish of One Type, Recognition, Is Not a Substitute for a Wish of Another Type, Response.

14. The Dominant Wish: Its Role in the Organization of the Person and of the Group.

15. Typical Attitudes: Familism, Individualism, "Oppressed Nationality Psychosis," Race Prejudice.

16. The Mutability of the Sentiment-Attitude: Love and Hate, Self-esteem and Humility, etc.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Make a list of the outstanding social forces affecting social life in a community which you know. What is the value of such an analysis?

2. How does Simons use the term "social forces" in analyzing the course of events in American history?

3. In what sense do you understand Ely to use the term "social forces"?

4. Would there be, in your opinion, a social tendency without conflict with other tendencies?

5. How far is it correct to predict from present tendencies what the future will be?

6. What do you understand by Zeitgeist, "trend of the times," "spirit of the age"?

7. What do you understand by public opinion? How does it originate?

8. Is legislation in the United States always a result of public opinion?

9. Does the trend of public opinion determine corporate action?

10. Is public opinion the same as the sum of the opinion of the members of the group?

11. What is the relation of social forces to interaction?

12. Is it possible to study trends, tendencies, and public opinion as integrations of interests, sentiments, and attitudes?

13. Are desires the fundamental "social elements"?

14. What do you understand Small to mean when he says, "The last elements to which we can reduce the actions of human beings are units which we may conveniently name 'interests'"?

15. What is Small's classification of interests? Do you regard it as satisfactory?

16. What do you think is the difference between an impulse and an interest?

17. Do people behave according to their interests or their impulses?

18. Make a chart showing the difference in interests of six persons with whom you are acquainted.

19. Make a chart indicating the variations in interests of six selected groups.

20. What difference is there, in your opinion, between interests and social pressures?

21. Do you consider the following statement of Bentley's correct: "No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government"?

22. Does the group exert social pressure upon its members? Give illustrations.

23. What do you understand to be the differences between an idea and an idea-force?

24. Give illustrations of idea-forces.

25. Are there any ideas that are not idea-forces?

26. What do you understand by a sentiment?

27. What is the difference between an interest and a sentiment? Give an illustration of each.

28. Are sentiments or interests more powerful in influencing the behavior of a person or of a group?

29. What do you understand by a social attitude?

30. What is a mental conflict?

31. To what extent does unconsciousness rather than consciousness determine the behavior of a person? Give an illustration where the behavior of a person was inconsistent with his rational determination.

32. What do you understand by mental complexes?

33. What is the relation of memory to mental complexes?

34. What do you understand by personality? What is its relation to mental complexes?

35. What is meant by common sense?

36. How does Holt define the Freudian wish?

37. What distinction does he make between the wish and the motor attitude?

38. How would you illustrate the difference between an attitude and a wish as defined in the introduction?

39. How far would you say that the attitude may be described as an organization of the wishes?

40. How far is the analogy between the wish as the social atom and the attitude as the social element justified?

41 What is the "psychic censor"?

42. What is the Freudian theory of repression? Is repression conscious or unconscious?

43. What is the relation of wishes to occupational selection?

44. Give illustrations of the "four wishes."

45. Describe a person in terms of the type of expression of these four wishes.

46. What social problems arise because of the repression of certain wishes?

47. "Wishes in one class cannot be substituted for wishes in another." Do you agree? Elaborate your position.

48. Analyze the organization of a group from the standpoint of the four wishes.

FOOTNOTES:

[157] Adapted from A. M. Simons, in the Preface to Social Forces in American History, pp. vii-viii. (Published by The Macmillan Co., 1912. Reprinted by permission.)

[158] Adapted from Richard T. Ely, Evolution of Industrial Society, pp. 456-84. (Published by The Macmillan Co., 1903. Reprinted by permission.)

[159] Adapted from A. V. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, pp. 19-41. (Published by The Macmillan Co., 1905. Reprinted by permission.)

[160] Adapted from Albion W. Small, General Sociology, pp. 532-36. (The University of Chicago Press, 1905.)

[161] Adapted from Albion W. Small, General Sociology, pp. 425-36. (The University of Chicago Press, 1905.)

[162] Adapted from Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government, pp. 258-381. (The University of Chicago Press, 1908.)

[163] Adapted from Alfred Fouillee, Education from a National Standpoint, pp. 10-16. (D. Appleton & Co., 1897.)

[164] Adapted from William McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, pp. 121-64. (John W. Luce & Co., 1916.)

[165] From Robert E. Park, Principles of Human Behavior, pp. 18-34. (The Zalaz Corporation, 1915.)

[166] Adapted from Edwin B. Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, pp. 3-56. (Henry Holt & Co., 1915.)

[167] Adapted from John B. Watson, "The Psychology of Wish Fulfillment," in the Scientific Monthly, III (1916), 479-86.

[168] A restatement from a paper by William I. Thomas, "The Persistence of Primary-Group Norms in Present-Day Society," in Jennings, Watson, Meyer, and Thomas, Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education. (Published by The Macmillan Co., 1917. Reprinted by permission.)

[169] Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1901, p. 300.

[170] See p. 219.

[171] H. A. Taine, The Ancient Regime, Preface, p. viii. (New York, 1891.)

[172] Karl Lamprecht, What Is History? p. 3. (New York, 1905.)

[173] See chap. i, Sociology and the Social Sciences, pp. 6-12.

[174] See references, chap. ii, "Human Nature," p. 149.

[175] For a discussion of the philosophical background of Adam Smith's political philosophy see Wilhelm Hasbach, Untersuchungen ueber Adam Smith. (Leipzig, 1891.)

[176] "The science of Political Economy as we have it in England may be defined as the science of business, such as business is in large productive and trading communities. It is an analysis of that world so familiar to many Englishmen—the 'great commerce' by which England has become rich. It assumes the principal facts which make that commerce possible, and as is the way of an abstract science it isolates and simplifies them: it detaches them from the confusion with which they are mixed in fact. And it deals too with the men who carry on that commerce, and who make it possible. It assumes a sort of human nature such as we see everywhere around us, and again it simplifies that human nature; it looks at one part of it only. Dealing with matters of 'business,' it assumes that man is actuated only by motives of business. It assumes that every man who makes anything, makes it for money, that he always makes that which brings him in most at least cost, and that he will make it in the way that will produce most and spend least; it assumes that every man who buys, buys with his whole heart, and that he who sells, sells with his whole heart, each wanting to gain all possible advantage. Of course we know that this is not so, that men are not like this; but we assume it for simplicity's sake, as an hypothesis."—Walter Bagehot, The Postulates of English Political Economy. (New York and London, 1885.)

[177] H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, Vol. II, pp. 579-95. (New York, 1920.)

[178] Pure Sociology, p. 261. (New York, 1903.)

[179] Dynamic Sociology, II, 90.(New York, 1883.)



CHAPTER VIII

COMPETITION

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Popular Conception of Competition

Competition, as a universal phenomenon, was first clearly conceived and adequately described by the biologists. As defined in the evolutionary formula "the struggle for existence" the notion captured the popular imagination and became a commonplace of familiar discourse. Prior to that time competition had been regarded as an economic rather than a biological phenomenon.

It was in the eighteenth century and in England that we first find any general recognition of the new role that commerce and the middleman were to play in the modern world. "Competition is the life of trade" is a trader's maxim, and the sort of qualified approval that it gives to the conception of competition contains the germ of the whole philosophy of modern industrial society as that doctrine was formulated by Adam Smith and the physiocrats.

The economists of the eighteenth century were the first to attempt to rationalize and justify the social order that is based on competition and individual freedom. They taught that there was a natural harmony in the interests of men, which once liberated would inevitably bring about, in the best of all possible worlds, the greatest good to the greatest number.

The individual man, in seeking his own profit, will necessarily seek to produce and sell that which has most value for the community, and so "he is in this, as in many other cases," as Adam Smith puts it, "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

The conception has been stated with even greater unction by the French writer, Frederic Bastiat.

Since goods which seem at first to be the exclusive property of individuals become by the estimable decrees of a wise providence [competition] the common possession of all; since the natural advantages of situation, the fertility, temperature, mineral richness of the soil and even industrial skill do not accrue to the producers, because of competition among themselves, but contribute so much the more to the profit of the consumer; it follows that there is no country that is not interested in the advancement of all the others.[180]

The freedom which commerce sought and gained upon the principle of laissez faire has enormously extended the area of competition and in doing so has created a world-economy where previously there were only local markets. It has created at the same time a division of labor that includes all the nations and races of men and incidentally has raised the despised middleman to a position of affluence and power undreamed of by superior classes of any earlier age. And now there is a new demand for the control of competition in the interest, not merely of those who have not shared in the general prosperity, but in the interest of competition itself.

"Unfair competition" is an expression that is heard at the present time with increasing frequency. This suggests that there are rules governing competition by which, in its own interest, it can and should be controlled. The same notion has found expression in the demand for "freedom of competition" from those who would safeguard competition by controlling it. Other voices have been raised in denunciation of competition because "competition creates monopoly." In other words, competition, if carried to its logical conclusion, ends in the annihilation of competition. In this destruction of competition by competition we seem to have a loss of freedom by freedom, or, to state it in more general terms, unlimited liberty, without social control, ends in the negation of freedom and the slavery of the individual. But the limitation of competition by competition, it needs to be said, means simply that the process of competition tends invariably to establish an equilibrium.

The more fundamental objection is that in giving freedom to economic competition society has sacrificed other fundamental interests that are not directly involved in the economic process. In any case economic freedom exists in an order that has been created and maintained by society. Economic competition, as we know it, presupposes the existence of the right of private property, which is a creation of the state. It is upon this premise that the more radical social doctrines, communism and socialism, seek to abolish competition altogether.

2. Competition a Process of Interaction

Of the four great types of interaction—competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation—competition is the elementary, universal and fundamental form. Social contact, as we have seen, initiates interaction. But competition, strictly speaking, is interaction without social contact. If this seems, in view of what has already been said, something of a paradox, it is because in human society competition is always complicated with other processes, that is to say, with conflict, assimilation, and accommodation.

It is only in the plant community that we can observe the process of competition in isolation, uncomplicated with other social processes. The members of a plant community live together in a relation of mutual interdependence which we call social probably because, while it is close and vital, it is not biological. It is not biological because the relation is a merely external one and the plants that compose it are not even of the same species. They do not interbreed. The members of a plant community adapt themselves to one another as all living things adapt themselves to their environment, but there is no conflict between them because they are not conscious. Competition takes the form of conflict or rivalry only when it becomes conscious, when competitors identify one another as rivals or as enemies.

This suggests what is meant by the statement that competition is interaction without social contact. It is only when minds meet, only when the meaning that is in one mind is communicated to another mind so that these minds mutually influence one another, that social contact, properly speaking, may be said to exist.

On the other hand, social contacts are not limited to contacts of touch or sense or speech, and they are likely to be more intimate and more pervasive than we imagine. Some years ago the Japanese, who are brown, defeated the Russians, who are white. In the course of the next few months the news of this remarkable event penetrated, as we afterward learned, uttermost ends of the earth. It sent a thrill through all Asia and it was known in the darkest corners of Central Africa. Everywhere it awakened strange and fantastic dreams. This is what is meant by social contact.

a) Competition and competitive co-operation.—Social contact, which inevitably initiates conflict, accommodation, or assimilation, invariably creates also sympathies, prejudices, personal and moral relations which modify, complicate, and control competition. On the other hand, within the limits which the cultural process creates, and custom, law, and tradition impose, competition invariably tends to create an impersonal social order in which each individual, being free to pursue his own profit, and, in a sense, compelled to do so, makes every other individual a means to that end. In doing so, however, he inevitably contributes through the mutual exchange of services so established to the common welfare. It is just the nature of the trading transaction to isolate the motive of profit and make it the basis of business organization, and so far as this motive becomes dominant and exclusive, business relations inevitably assume the impersonal character so generally ascribed to them.

"Competition," says Walker, "is opposed to sentiment. Whenever any economic agent does or forbears anything under the influence of any sentiment other than the desire of giving the least and gaining the most he can in exchange, be that sentiment patriotism, or gratitude, or charity, or vanity, leading him to do otherwise than as self interest would prompt, in that case also, the rule of competition is departed from. Another rule is for the time substituted."[181]

This is the significance of the familiar sayings to the effect that one "must not mix business with sentiment," that "business is business," "corporations are heartless," etc. It is just because corporations are "heartless," that is to say impersonal, that they represent the most advanced, efficient, and responsible form of business organization. But it is for this same reason that they can and need to be regulated in behalf of those interests of the community that cannot be translated immediately into terms of profit and loss to the individual.

The plant community is the best illustration of the type of social organization that is created by competitive co-operation because in the plant community competition is unrestricted.

b) Competition and freedom.—The economic organization of society, so far as it is an effect of free competition, is an ecological organization. There is a human as well as a plant and an animal ecology.

If we are to assume that the economic order is fundamentally ecological, that is, created by the struggle for existence, an organization like that of the plant community in which the relations between individuals are conceivably at least wholly external, the question may be very properly raised why the competition and the organization it has created should be regarded as social at all. As a matter of fact sociologists have generally identified the social with the moral order, and Dewey, in his Democracy and Education, makes statements which suggest that the purely economic order, in which man becomes a means rather than an end to other men, is unsocial, if not anti-social.

The fact is, however, that this character of externality in human relations is a fundamental aspect of society and social life. It is merely another manifestation of what has been referred to as the distributive aspect of society. Society is made up of individuals spatially separated, territorially distributed, and capable of independent locomotion. This capacity of independent locomotion is the basis and the symbol of every other form of independence. Freedom is fundamentally freedom to move and individuality is inconceivable without the capacity and the opportunity to gain an individual experience as a result of independent action.

On the other hand, it is quite as true that society may be said to exist only so far as this independent activity of the individual is controlled in the interest of the group as a whole. That is the reason why the problem of control, using that term in its evident significance, inevitably becomes the central problem of sociology.

c) Competition and control.—Conflict, assimilation and accommodation as distinguished from competition are all intimately related to control. Competition is the process through which the distributive and ecological organization of society is created. Competition determines the distribution of population territorially and vocationally. The division of labor and all the vast organized economic interdependence of individuals and groups of individuals characteristic of modern life are a product of competition. On the other hand, the moral and political order, which imposes itself upon this competitive organization, is a product of conflict, accommodation and assimilation.

Competition is universal in the world of living things. Under ordinary circumstances it goes on unobserved even by the individuals who are most concerned. It is only in periods of crisis, when men are making new and conscious efforts to control the conditions of their common life, that the forces with which they are competing get identified with persons, and competition is converted into conflict. It is in what has been described as the political process that society consciously deals with its crises.[182] War is the political process par excellence. It is in war that the great decisions are made. Political organizations exist for the purpose of dealing with conflict situations. Parties, parliaments and courts, public discussion and voting are to be considered simply as substitutes for war.

d) Accommodation, assimilation, and competition.—Accommodation, on the other hand, is the process by which the individuals and groups make the necessary internal adjustments to social situations which have been created by competition and conflict. War and elections change situations. When changes thus effected are decisive and are accepted, conflict subsides and the tensions it created are resolved in the process of accommodation into profound modifications of the competing units, i.e., individuals and groups. A man once thoroughly defeated is, as has often been noted, "never the same again." Conquest, subjugation, and defeat are psychological as well as social processes. They establish a new order by changing, not merely the status, but the attitudes of the parties involved. Eventually the new order gets itself fixed in habit and custom and is then transmitted as part of the established social order to succeeding generations. Neither the physical nor the social world is made to satisfy at once all the wishes of the natural man. The rights of property, vested interests of every sort, the family organization, slavery, caste and class, the whole social organization, in fact, represent accommodations, that is to say, limitations of the natural wishes of the individual. These socially inherited accommodations have presumably grown up in the pains and struggles of previous generations, but they have been transmitted to and accepted by succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable social order. All of these are forms of control in which competition is limited by status.

Conflict is then to be identified with the political order and with conscious control. Accommodation, on the other hand, is associated with the social order that is fixed and established in custom and the mores.

Assimilation, as distinguished from accommodation, implies a more thoroughgoing transformation of the personality—a transformation which takes place gradually under the influence of social contacts of the most concrete and intimate sort.

Accommodation may be regarded, like religious conversion, as a kind of mutation. The wishes are the same but their organization is different. Assimilation takes place not so much as a result of changes in the organization as in the content, i.e., the memories, of the personality. The individual units, as a result of intimate association, interpenetrate, so to speak, and come in this way into possession of a common experience and a common tradition. The permanence and solidarity of the group rest finally upon this body of common experience and tradition. It is the role of history to preserve this body of common experience and tradition, to criticise and reinterpret it in the light of new experience and changing conditions, and in this way to preserve the continuity of the social and political life.

The relation of social structures to the processes of competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation may be represented schematically as follows:

SOCIAL PROCESS SOCIAL ORDER

Competition The economic equilibrium Conflict The political order Accommodation Social organization Assimilation Personality and the cultural heritage

3. Classification of the Materials

The materials in this chapter have been selected to exhibit (1) the role which competition plays in social life and all life, and (2) the types of organization that competition has everywhere created as a result of the division of labor it has everywhere enforced. These materials fall naturally under the following heads: (a) the struggle for existence; (b) competition and segregation; and (c) economic competition.

This order of the materials serves the purpose of indicating the stages in the growth and extension of man's control over nature and over man himself. The evolution of society has been the progressive extension of control over nature and the substitution of a moral for the natural order.

Competition has its setting in the struggle for existence. This struggle is ordinarily represented as a chaos of contending individuals in which the unfit perish in order that the fit may survive. This conception of the natural order as one of anarchy, "the war of each against all," familiar since Hobbes to the students of society, is recent in biology. Before Darwin, students of plant and animal life saw in nature, not disorder, but order; not selection, but design. The difference between the older and the newer interpretation is not so much a difference of fact as of point of view. Looking at the plant and animal species with reference to their classification they present a series of relatively fixed and stable types. The same thing may be said of the plant and animal communities. Under ordinary circumstances the adjustment between the members of the plant and animal communities and the environment is so complete that the observer interprets it as an order of co-operation rather than a condition of competitive anarchy.

Upon investigation it turns out, however, that the plant and animal communities are in a state of unstable equilibrium, such that any change in the environment may destroy them. Communities of this type are not organized to resist or adapt themselves as communities to changes in the environment. The plant community, for example, is a mere product of segregation, an aggregate without nerves or means of communication that would permit the individuals to be controlled in the interest of the community as a whole.[183]

The situation is different in the so-called animal societies. Animals are adapted in part to the situation of competition, but in part also to the situation of co-operation. With the animal, maternal instinct, gregariousness, sex attraction restrict competition to a greater or less extent among individuals of the same family, herd, or species. In the case of the ant community competition is at a minimum and co-operation at a maximum.

With man the free play of competition is restrained by sentiment, custom, and moral standards, not to speak of the more conscious control through law.

It is a characteristic of competition, when unrestricted, that it is invariably more severe among organisms of the same than of different species. Man's greatest competitor is man. On the other hand, man's control over the plant and animal world is now well-nigh complete, so that, generally speaking, only such plants and animals are permitted to exist as serve man's purpose.

Competition among men, on the other hand, has been very largely converted into rivalry and conflict. The effect of conflict has been to extend progressively the area of control and to modify and limit the struggle for existence within these areas. The effect of war has been, on the whole, to extend the area over which there is peace. Competition has been restricted by custom, tradition, and law, and the struggle for existence has assumed the form of struggle for a livelihood and for status.

Absolute free play of competition is neither desirable nor even possible. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the individual, competition means mobility, freedom, and, from the point of view of society, pragmatic or experimental change. Restriction of competition is synonymous with limitation of movement, acquiescence in control, and telesis, Ward's term for changes ordained by society in distinction from the natural process of change.

The political problem of every society is the practical one: how to secure the maximum values of competition, that is, personal freedom, initiative, and originality, and at the same time to control the energies which competition has released in the interest of the community.

II. MATERIALS

A. THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

1. Different Forms of the Struggle for Existence[184]

The formula "struggle for existence," familiar in human affairs, was used by Darwin in his interpretation of organic life, and he showed that we gain clearness in our outlook on animate nature if we recognize there, in continual process, a struggle for existence not merely analogous to, but fundamentally the same as, that which goes on in human life. He projected on organic life a sociological idea, and showed that it fitted. But while he thus vindicated the relevancy and utility of the sociological idea within the biological realm, he declared explicitly that the phrase "struggle for existence" was meant to be a shorthand formula, summing up a vast variety of strife and endeavor, of thrust and parry, of action and reaction.

Some of Darwin's successors have taken pains to distinguish a great many different forms of the struggle for existence, and this kind of analysis is useful in keeping us aware of the complexities of the process. Darwin himself does not seem to have cared much for this logical mapping out and defining; it was enough for him to insist that the phrase was used "in a large and metaphorical sense," and to give full illustrations of its various modes. For our present purpose it is enough for us to follow his example.

a) Struggle between fellows.—When the locusts of a huge swarm have eaten up every green thing, they sometimes turn on one another. This cannibalism among fellows of the same species—illustrated, for instance, among many fishes—is the most intense form of the struggle for existence. The struggle does not need to be direct to be real; the essential point is that the competitors seek after the same desiderata, of which there is a limited supply.

As an instance of keen struggle between nearly related species, Darwin referred to the combats of rats. The black rat was in possession of many European towns before the brown rat crossed the Volga in 1727; whenever the brown rat arrived, the black rat had to go to the wall. Thus at the present day there are practically no black rats in Great Britain. Here the struggle for existence is again directly competitive. It is difficult to separate the struggle for food and foothold from the struggle for mates, and it seems clearest to include here the battles of the stags and the capercailzies, or the extraordinary lek of the blackcock, showing off their beauty at sunrise on the hills.

b) Struggle between foes.—In the locust swarm and in the rats' combats there is competition between fellows of the same or nearly related species, but the struggle for existence includes much wider antipathies. We see it between foes of entirely different nature, between carnivores and herbivores, between birds of prey and small mammals. In both these cases there may be a stand-up fight, for instance between wolf and stag, or between hawk and ermine; but neither the logic nor the biology of the process is different when all the fight is on one side. As the lemmings, which have overpopulated the Scandinavian valleys, go on the march they are followed by birds and beasts of prey, which thin their ranks. Moreover, the competition between species need not be direct; it will come to the same result if both types seek after the same things. The victory will be with the more effective and the more prolific.

c) Struggle with fate.—Our sweep widens still further, and we pass beyond the idea of competition altogether to cases where the struggle for existence is between the living organism and the inanimate conditions of its life—for instance, between birds and the winter's cold, between aquatic animals and changes in the water, between plants and drought, between plants and frost—in a wide sense, between Life and Fate.

We cannot here pursue the suggestive idea that, besides struggle between individuals, there is struggle between groups of individuals—the latter most noticeably developed in mankind. Similarly, working in the other direction, there is struggle between parts or tissues in the body, between cells in the body, between equivalent germ-cells, and, perhaps, as Weismann pictures, between the various multiplicate items that make up our inheritance.

2. Competition and Natural Selection[185]

The term "struggle for existence" is used in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in a time of dearth may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which only one of an average comes to maturity, may be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The mistletoe is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched sense be said to struggle with these trees, for, if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it languishes and dies. But several seedling mistletoes growing close together on the same branch may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on them; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants in tempting the birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds. In these several senses which pass into each other, I use for convenience' sake the general term of "struggle for existence."

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing more or less rapidly in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate in less than a thousand years there would literally not be standing-room for his progeny. Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds—and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase; it will be safest to assume that it begins breeding when thirty years old and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth six young in the interval and surviving till one hundred years old; if this be so, after a period of from 740 to 750 years there would be nearly nineteen million elephants alive, descended from the first pair.

The struggle for life is most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species. As the species of the same genus usually have, though by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always similarity in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them if they come into competition with each other than between the species of distinct genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missel-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates! In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. In Australia the imported hive-bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.

A corollary of the highest importance may be deduced from the foregoing remarks, namely, that the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence or from which it has to escape or on which it preys. This is obvious in the structure of the teeth and talons of the tiger; and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite which clings to the hair on the tiger's body. But in the beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion, and in the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle, the relation seems at first confined to the elements of air and water. Yet the advantage of plumed seeds no doubt stands in the closest relations to the land being already thickly clothed with other plants; so that the seeds may be widely distributed and fall on unoccupied ground. In the water beetle, the structure of its legs, so well adapted for diving, allows it to compete with other aquatic insects, to hunt for its own prey, and to escape serving as prey to other animals.

The store of nutriment laid up within the seeds of many plants seems at first sight to have no sort of relation to other plants. But from the strong growth of young plants produced from such seeds, as peas and beans, when sown in the midst of long grass, it may be suspected that the chief use of the nutriment in the seed is to favor the growth of seedlings whilst struggling with other plants growing vigorously all around.

Look at a plant in the midst of its range; why does it not double or quadruple its numbers? We know that it can perfectly well withstand a little more heat or cold, dampness or dryness, for elsewhere it ranges into slightly hotter or colder, damper or drier, districts. In this case we can clearly see that if we wish in imagination to give the plant the power of increasing in number, we should have to give it some advantage over its competitors, or over the animals which prey upon it. On the confines of its geographical range, a change of constitution with respect to climate would clearly be an advantage to our plant; but we have reason to believe that only a few plants or animals range so far, that they are destroyed exclusively by the rigor of the climate. Not until we reach the extreme confines of life, in the Arctic regions or on the borders of an utter desert, will competition cease. The land may be extremely cold or dry, yet there will be competition between some few species, or between the individuals of the same species, for the warmest or dampest spots.

Hence we can see that when a plant or an animal is placed in a new country amongst new competitors, the conditions of its life will generally be changed in an essential manner, although the climate may be exactly the same as in its former home. If its average numbers are to increase in its new home, we should have to modify it in a different way to what we should have had to do in its native country; for we should have to give it some advantage over a different set of competitors or enemies.

It is good thus to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings, a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

3. Competition, Specialization, and Organization[186]

Natural selection acts exclusively by the preservation and accumulation of variations, which are beneficial under the organic and inorganic conditions to which each creature is exposed at all periods of life. The ultimate result is that each creature tends to become more and more improved in relation to its conditions. This improvement inevitably leads to the gradual advancement of the organization of the greater number of living beings throughout the world.

But here we enter on a very intricate subject, for naturalists have not defined to each other's satisfaction what is meant by an advance in organization. Amongst the vertebrata the degree of intellect and an approach in structure to man clearly come into play. It might be thought that the amount of change which the various parts and organs pass through in their development from the embryo to maturity would suffice as a standard of comparison; but there are cases, as with certain parasitic crustaceans, in which several parts of the structure become less perfect, so that the mature animal cannot be called higher than its larva. Von Baer's standard seems the most widely applicable and the best, namely, the amount of differentiation of the parts of the same organic being, in the adult state, as I should be inclined to add, and their specialization for different functions; or, as Milne Edwards would express it, the completeness of the division of physiological labor. But we shall see how obscure this subject is if we look, for instance, to fishes, amongst which some naturalists rank those as highest which, like the sharks, approach nearest to amphibians; whilst other naturalists rank the common bony or teleostean fishes as the highest, inasmuch as they are most strictly fishlike and differ most from the other vertebrate classes. We see still more plainly the obscurity of the subject by turning to plants, amongst which the standard of intellect is, of course, quite excluded; and here some botanists rank those plants as highest which have every organ, as sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, fully developed in each flower; whereas other botanists, probably with more truth, look at the plants which have their several organs much modified and reduced in number as the highest.

If we take as the standard of high organization the amount of differentiation and specialization of the several organs in each being when adult (and this will include the advancement of the brain for intellectual purposes), natural selection clearly leads toward this standard; for all physiologists admit that the specialization of organs, inasmuch as in this state they perform their functions better, is an advantage to each being; and hence the accumulation of variations tending toward specialization is within the scope of natural selection. On the other hand, we can see, bearing in mind that all organic beings are striving to increase at a high ratio and to seize on every unoccupied or less well-occupied place in the economy of nature, that it is quite possible for natural selection gradually to fit a being to a situation in which several organs would be superfluous or useless: in such cases there would be retrogression in the scale of organization.

But it may be objected that if all organic beings thus tend to rise in the scale, how is it that throughout the world a multitude of the lowest forms still exist; and how is it that in each great class some forms are far more highly developed than others? Why have not the more highly developed forms everywhere supplanted and exterminated the lower? On our theory the continued existence of lowly organisms offers no difficulty for natural selection, or the survival of the fittest does not necessarily include progressive development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life. And it may be asked what advantage, as far as we can see, would it be to an infusorian animalcule—to an intestinal worm, or even to an earthworm—to be highly organized. If it were no advantage, these forms would be left, by natural selection, unimproved or but little improved, and might remain for indefinite ages in their present lowly condition. And geology tells us that some of the lowest forms, as the infusoria and rhizopods, have remained for an enormous period in nearly their present state. But to suppose that most of the many low forms now existing have not in the least advanced since the first dawn of life would be extremely rash; for every naturalist who has dissected some of the beings now ranked as very low in the scale must have been struck with their really wondrous and beautiful organization.

Nearly the same remarks are applicable if we look to the different grades of organization within the same great group; for instance, in the vertebrata to the coexistence of mammals and fish; amongst mammalia to the coexistence of man and the ornithorhynchus; amongst fishes to the coexistence of the shark and the lancelet (Amphioxus), which later fish in the extreme simplicity of its structure approaches the invertebrate classes. But mammals and fish hardly come into competition with each other; the advancement of the whole class of mammals, or of certain members in this class, to the highest grade would not lead to their taking the place of fishes. Physiologists believe that the brain must be bathed by warm blood to be highly active, and this requires aerial respiration; so that warm-blooded mammals when inhabiting the water lie under a disadvantage in having to come continually to the surface to breathe. With fishes, members of the shark family would not tend to supplant the lancelet; for the lancelet, as I hear from Fritz Mueller, has as sole companion and competitor on the barren sandy shore of South Brazil an anomalous annelid. The three lowest orders of mammals, namely, marsupials, edentata, and rodents, coexist in South America in the same region with numerous monkeys, and probably interfere little with each other.

Although organization, on the whole, may have advanced and may be still advancing throughout the world, yet the scale will always present many degrees of perfection; for the high advancement of certain whole classes, or of certain members of each class, does not at all necessarily lead to the extinction of those groups with which they do not enter into close competition. In some cases, lowly organized forms appear to have been preserved to the present day from inhabiting confined or peculiar stations, where they have been subjected to less severe competition and where their scanty numbers have retarded the chance of favorable variations arising.

Finally, I believe that many lowly organized forms now exist throughout the world from various causes. In some cases variations or individual differences of a favorable nature may never have arisen for natural selection to act on and accumulate. In no case, probably, has time sufficed for the utmost possible amount of development. In some few cases there has been what we must call retrogression of organization. But the main cause lies in the fact that under very simple conditions of life a high organization would be of no service—possibly would be of actual disservice, as being of a more delicate nature and more liable to be put out of order and injured.

4. Man: An Adaptive Mechanism[187]

Everything in nature, living or not living, exists and develops at the expense of some other thing, living or not living. The plant borrows from the soil; the soil from the rocks and the atmosphere; men and animals take from the plants and from each other the elements which they in death return to the soil, the atmosphere, and the plants. Year after year, century after century, eon after eon, the mighty, immeasurable, ceaseless round of elements goes on, in the stupendous process of chemical change, which marks the eternal life of matter.

To the superficial observer, nature in all her parts seems imbued with a spirit of profound peace and harmony; to the scientist it is obvious that every infinitesimal particle of the immense concourse is in a state of desperate and ceaseless struggle to obtain such share of the available supply of matter and energy as will suffice to maintain its present ephemeral form in a state of equilibrium with its surroundings. Not only is this struggle manifest among living forms, among birds and beasts and insects in their competition for food and habitat, but—if we may believe the revelations of the science of radio-activity—a process of transmutation, of disintegration of the atoms of one element with simultaneous formation of another element, is taking place in every fragment of inanimate matter, a process which parallels in character the more transitory processes of life and death in organisms and is probably a representation of the primary steps in that great process of evolution by which all terrestrial forms, organic and inorganic, have been evolved from the original ether by an action inconceivably slow, continuous, and admitting of no break in the series from inanimate to animate forms.

From colloidal slime to man is a long road, the conception of which taxes our imaginations to the utmost, but it is an ascent which is now fairly well demonstrated. Indeed, the problems of the missing links are not so difficult as is the problem of the origin of the organs and functions which man has acquired as products of adaptation. For whether we look upon the component parts of our present bodies as useful or useless mechanisms, we must regard them as the result of age-long conflicts between environmental forces and organisms.

Everywhere something is pursuing and something is escaping another creature. It is a constant drama of getting food and of seeking to escape being made food, evolving in the conflict structures fitted to accomplish both reactions. Everywhere the strong prey upon the weak, the swift upon the slow, the clever upon the stupid; and the weak, the slow, the stupid, retaliate by evolving mechanisms of defense, which more or less adequately repel or render futile the oppressor's attack. For each must live, and those already living have proved their right to existence by a more or less complete adaptation to their environment. The result of this twofold conflict between living beings is to evolve the manifold structures and functions—teeth, claws, skin, color, fur, feathers, horns, tusks, wily instincts, strength, stealth, deceit, and humility—which make up character in the animal world. According to the nature and number of each being's enemies has its own special mechanism been evolved, distinguishing it from its fellows and enabling it to get a living in its particular environment.

In every case the fate of each creature seems to have been staked upon one mechanism. The tiger by its teeth and claws, the elephant and the rhinoceros by their strength, the bird by its wings, the deer by its fleetness, the turtle by its carapace—all are enabled to counter the attacks of enemies and to procreate. Where there is a negative defense, such as a shell or quills, there is little need and no evidence of intelligence: where a rank odor, no need and no presence of claws or carapace; where sting or venom, no need and no possession of odor, claws, shell, extraordinary strength, or sagacity. Where the struggle is most bitter, there exist the most complex and most numerous contrivances for living.

Throughout its whole course the process of evolution, where it is visible in the struggle of organisms, has been marked by a progressive victory of brain over brawn. And this, in turn, may be regarded as but a manifestation of the process of survival by lability rather than by stability. Everywhere the organism that exhibits the qualities of quick response, of extreme sensibility to stimuli, of capacity to change, is the individual that survives, "conquers," "advances." The quality most useful in nature, from the point of view of the domination of a wider environment, is the quality of changeableness, plasticity, mobility, or versatility. Man's particular means of adaptation to his environment is this quality of versatility. By means of this quality expressed through the manifold reactions of his highly organized central nervous system, man has been able to dominate the beasts and to maintain himself in an environment many times more extensive than theirs. Like the defensive mechanisms of shells, poisons, and odors, man's particular defensive mechanism—his versatility of nervous response (mind)—was acquired automatically as a result of a particular combination of circumstances in his environment.

In the Tertiary era—some twenty millions of years ago—the earth, basking in the warmth of a tropical climate, had produced a luxuriant vegetation and a swarming progeny of gigantic small-brained animals for which the exuberant vegetation provided abundant and easily acquired sustenance. They were a breed of huge, clumsy, and grotesque monsters, vast in bulk and strength, but of little intelligence, that wandered heavily on the land and gorged lazily on the abundant food at hand. With the advance of the carnivora, the primitive forerunners of our tigers, wolves, hyenas, and foxes, came a period of stress, comparable to a seven years of famine following a seven years of plenty, which subjected the stolid herbivorous monsters to a severe selective struggle.

Before the active onslaught of lighter, lither, more intelligent foes, the clumsy, inelastic types succumbed, those only surviving which, through the fortunate possession of more varied reactions, were able to evolve modes of defense equal to the modes of attack possessed by their enemies. Many, unable to evolve the acute senses and the fleet limbs necessary for the combat on the ground, shrank from the fray and acquired more negative and passive means of defense. Some, like the bat, escaped into the air. Others, such as the squirrel and the ape, took refuge in the trees.

It was in this concourse of weak creatures which fled to the trees because they lacked adequate means of offense, defense, or escape on the ground that the lineaments of man's ancient ancestor might have been discerned. One can imagine what must have been the pressure from the carnivora that forced a selective transformation of the feet of the progenitor of the anthropoids into grasping hands. Coincidentally with the tree life, man's special line of adaptation—versatility—was undoubtedly rapidly evolved. Increased versatility and the evolution of hands enabled man to come down from the trees millions of years thereafter, to conquer the world by the further evolution and exercise of his organ of strategy—the brain. Thus we may suppose have arisen the intricate reactions we now call mind, reason, foresight, invention, etc.

Man's claim to a superior place among animals depends less upon different reactions than upon a greater number of reactions as compared with the reactions of "lower" animals. Ability to respond adaptively to more elements in the environment gives a larger dominion, that is all.

The same measure applies within the human species—the number of nervous reactions of the artist, the financier, the statesman, the scientist, being invariably greater than the reactions of the stolid savage. That man alone of all animals should have achieved the degree of versatility sufficient for such advance is no more remarkable than that the elephant should have evolved a larger trunk and tusks than the boar; that the legs of the deer should be fleeter than those of the ox; that the wings of the swallow should outfly those of the bat. Each organism, in evolving the combination of characters commensurate with safety in its particular environment, has touched the limit of both its necessity and its power to "advance." There exists abundant and reliable evidence of the fact that wherever man has been subjected to the stunting influences of an unchanging environment fairly favorable to life, he has shown no more disposition to progress than the most stolid animals. Indeed, he has usually retrograded. The need to fight for food and home has been the spur that has ever driven man forward to establish the manifold forms of physical and mental life which make up human existence today. Like the simple adaptive mechanisms of the plant by which it gets air, and of the animal by which it overcomes its rivals in battle, the supremely differentiated functions of thought and human relations are the outcome of the necessity of the organism to become adapted to entities in its environment.

B. COMPETITION AND SEGREGATION

1. Plant Migration, Competition, and Segregation[188]

Invasion is the complete or complex process of which migration, ecesis (the adjustment of a plant to a new home), and competition are the essential parts. It embraces the whole movement of a plant or group of plants from one area into another and their colonization in the latter. From the very nature of migration, invasion is going on at all times and in all directions.

Effective invasion is predominantly local. It operates in mass only between bare areas and adjacent communities which contain species capable of pioneering, or between contiguous communities which offer somewhat similar conditions or contain species of wide range of adjustment. Invasion into a remote region rarely has any successional effect (effect tending to transform the character of a plant community), as the invaders are too few to make headway against the plants in possession or against those much nearer a new area. Invasion into a new area or a plant community begins with migration when this is followed by ecesis. In new areas, ecesis produces reaction (the effect which a plant or a community exerts upon its habitat) at once, and this is followed by aggregation and competition, with increasing reaction. In an area already occupied by plants, ecesis and competition are concomitant and quickly produce reactions. Throughout the development migrants are entering and leaving, and the interactions of the various processes come to be complex in the highest degree.

Local invasion in force is essentially continuous or recurrent. Between contiguous communities it is mutual, unless they are too dissimilar. The result is a transition area or ecotone which epitomizes the next stage in development. By far the greater amount of invasion into existing vegetation is of this sort. The movement into a bare area is likewise continuous, though it is necessarily not mutual, and hence there is no ecotone during the earlier stages. The significant feature of continuous invasion is that an outpost may be repeatedly reinforced, permitting rapid aggregation and ecesis, and the production of new centers from which the species may be extended over a wide area. Contrasted with continuous invasion is intermittent or periodic movement into distant regions, but this is rarely concerned in succession. When the movement of invaders into a community is so great that the original occupants are driven out, the invasion is complete.

A topographic feature or a physical or a biological agency that restricts or prevents invasions is a barrier. Topographic features are usually permanent and produce permanent barriers. Biological ones are often temporary and exist for a few years or even a single season. Temporary barriers are often recurrent, however. Barriers are complete or incomplete with respect to the thoroughness of their action. They may affect invasion either by limiting migration or by preventing ecesis.

Biological barriers comprise plant communities, man and animals, and parasitic plants. The limiting effect of a plant community is exhibited in two ways. In the first place, an association acts as a barrier to the ecesis of species invading it from associations of another type, on account of the physical differences of the habitats. Whether such a barrier be complete or partial will depend upon the relative unlikeness of the two areas. Shade plants are unable to invade a prairie, though the species of open thickets or woodland may do so to a certain degree. Closed communities (one in which all the soil is occupied) likewise exert a marked influence in decreasing invasion by reason of the intense and successful competition which all invaders must meet. Closed associations usually act as complete barriers, while more open ones restrict invasion in direct proportion to the degree of occupation. To this fact may be traced the fundamental law of succession (the law by which one type of community or formation is succeeded by another) that the number of stages is determined largely by the increasing difficulty of invasion as the area becomes stabilized. Man and animals affect invasion by the destruction of germules. Both in bare areas and in seral stages the action of rodents and birds is often decisive to the extent of altering the whole course of development. Man and animals operate as marked barriers to ecesis wherever they alter conditions unfavorably to invaders or where they turn the scale in competition by cultivating, grazing, camping, parasitism, etc. The absence of pollinating insects is sometimes a curious barrier to the complete ecesis of species far out of their usual habitat or region. Parasitic fungi decrease migration in so far as they affect seed production. They restrict or prevent ecesis either by the destruction of invaders or by placing them at a disadvantage with respect to the occupants.

By the term reaction is understood the effect which a plant or a community exerts upon its habitat. In connection with succession, the term is restricted to this special sense alone. It is entirely distinct from the response of the plant or group, i.e., its adjustment and adaptation to the habitat. In short, the habitat causes the plant to function and grow, and the plant then reacts upon the habitat, changing one or more of its factors in decisive or appreciable degree. The two processes are mutually complementary and often interact in most complex fashion.

The reaction of a community is usually more than the sum of the reactions of the component species and individuals. It is the individual plant which produces the reaction, though the latter usually becomes recognizable through the combined action of the group. In most cases the action of the group accumulates or emphasizes an effect which would otherwise be insignificant or temporary. A community of trees casts less shade than the same number of isolated individuals, but the shade is constant and continuous, and hence controlling. The significance of the community reaction is especially well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden waters illustrates the same fact.

2. Migration and Segregation[189]

All prehistoric investigation, as far as it relates to the phenomena of the animate world, necessarily rests upon the hypothesis of migration. The distribution of plants, of the lower animals, and of men over the surface of the earth; the relationships existing between the different languages, religious conceptions, myths and legends, customs and social institutions—all these seem in this one assumption to find their common explanation.

Each fresh advance in culture commences, so to speak, with a new period of wandering. The most primitive agriculture is nomadic, with a yearly abandonment of the cultivated area; the earliest trade is migratory trade; the first industries that free themselves from the household husbandry and become the special occupations of separate individuals are carried on itinerantly. The great founders of religion, the earliest poets and philosophers, the musicians and actors of past epochs, are all great wanderers. Even today, do not the inventor, the preacher of a new doctrine, and the virtuoso travel from place to place in search of adherents and admirers—notwithstanding the immense recent development in the means of communicating information?

As civilization grows older, settlement becomes more permanent. The Greek was more settled than the Phoenician, the Roman than the Greek, because one was always the inheritor of the culture of the other. Conditions have not changed. The German is more migratory than the Latin, the Slav than the German. The Frenchman cleaves to his native soil; the Russian leaves it with a light heart to seek in other parts of his broad fatherland more favorable conditions of living. Even the factory workman is but a periodically wandering peasant.

To all that can be adduced from experience in support of the statement that in the course of history mankind has been ever growing more settled, there comes a general consideration of a twofold nature. In the first place, the extent of fixed capital grows with advancing culture; the producer becomes stationary with his means of production. The itinerant smith of the southern Slav countries and the Westphalian iron works, the pack-horses of the Middle Ages and the great warehouses of our cities, the Thespian carts and the resident theater mark the starting and the terminal points of this evolution. In the second place, the modern machinery of transportation has in a far higher degree facilitated the transport of goods than of persons. The distribution of labor determined by locality thereby attains greater importance than the natural distribution of the means of production; the latter in many cases draws the former after it, where previously the reverse occurred.

The migrations occurring at the opening of the history of European peoples are migrations of whole tribes, a pushing and pressing of collective units from east to west, which lasted for centuries. The migrations of the Middle Ages ever affect individual classes alone; the knights in the crusades, the merchants, the wage-craftsmen, the journeymen hand-workers, the jugglers and minstrels, the villeins seeking protection within the walls of a town. Modern migrations, on the contrary, are generally a matter of private concern, the individuals being led by the most varied motives. They are almost invariably without organization. The process repeating itself daily a thousand times is united only through the one characteristic, that it is everywhere a question of change of locality by persons seeking more favorable conditions of life.

Among all the phenomena of masses in social life suited to statistical treatment, there is without doubt scarcely one that appears to fall of itself so completely under the general law of causality as migrations; and likewise hardly one concerning whose real cause such misty conceptions prevail.

The whole department of migrations has never yet undergone systematic statistical observation; exclusive attention has hitherto been centered upon remarkable individual occurrences of such phenomena. Even a rational classification of migrations in accord with the demand of social science is at the present moment lacking.

Such a classification would have to take as its starting-point the result of migrations from the point of view of population. On this basis they would fall into these groups: (1) migrations with continuous change of locality; (2) migrations with temporary change of settlement; (3) migrations with permanent settlement.

To the first group belong gypsy life, peddling, the carrying on of itinerant trades, tramp life; to the second, the wandering of journeymen craftsmen, domestic servants, tradesmen seeking the most favorable spots for temporary undertakings, officials to whom a definite office is for a time entrusted, scholars attending foreign institutions of learning; to the third, migration from place to place within the same country or province and to foreign parts, especially across the ocean.

An intermediate stage between the first and second group is found in the periodical migrations. To this stage belong the migrations of farm laborers at harvest time, of the sugar laborers at the time of the campagne, of the masons of Upper Italy and the Ticino district, common day-laborers, potters, chimney-sweeps, chestnut-roasters, etc., which occur at definite seasons.

In this division the influence of the natural and political insulation of the different countries is, it is true, neglected. It must not, however, be overlooked that in the era of nationalism and protection of national labor political allegiance has a certain importance in connection with the objective point of the migrations. It would, therefore, in our opinion, be more just to make another division, taking as a basis the politico-geographical extent of the migrations. From this point of view migrations would fall into internal and foreign types.

Internal migrations are those whose points of departure and destination lie within the same national limits; foreign, those extending beyond these. The foreign may again be divided into continental and extra-European (generally transmaritime) emigration. One can, however, in a larger sense designate all migrations that do not leave the limits of the Continent as internal, and contrast with them real emigration, or transfer of domicile to other parts of the globe.

Of all these manifold kinds of migration, the transmaritime alone has regularly been the subject of official statistics; and even it has been but imperfectly treated, as every student of this subject knows. The periodic emigrations of labor and the peddling trade have occasionally been also subjected to statistical investigation—mostly with the secondary aim of legislative restriction. Yet these migrations from place to place within the same country are vastly more numerous and in their consequences vastly more important than all other kinds of migration put together.

Of the total population of the kingdom of Belgium there were, according to the results of the census of December 31, 1880, not less than 32.8 per cent who were born outside the municipality in which they had their temporary domicile; of the population of Austria (1890), 34.8 per cent. In Prussia, of 27,279,111 persons, 11,552,033, or 42.4 per cent, were born outside the municipality where they were domiciled. More than two-fifths of the population had changed their municipality at least once.

If we call the total population born in a given place and domiciled anywhere within the borders of the country that locality's native population, then according to the conditions of interchange of population just presented the native population of the country places is greater than their actual population; that of the cities, smaller.

A balancing of the account of the internal migrations in the grand duchy of Oldenburg gives the cities a surplus, and country municipalities a deficit, of 15,162 persons. In the economy of population one is the complement of the other, just as in the case of two brothers of different temperament, one of whom regularly spends what the other has laboriously saved. To this extent, then, we are quite justified from the point of view of population in designating the cities man-consuming and the country municipalities man-producing social organisms.

There is a very natural explanation for this condition of affairs in the country. Where the peasant, on account of the small population of his place of residence, is much restricted in his local choice of help, adjoining communities must supplement one another. In like manner the inhabitants of small places will intermarry more frequently than the inhabitants of larger places where there is a greater choice among the native population. Here we have the occasion for very numerous migrations to places not far removed. Such migrations, however, only mean a local exchange of socially allied elements.

This absorption of the surplus of emigration over immigration is the characteristic of modern cities. If in our consideration of this problem we pay particular attention to this urban characteristic and to a like feature of the factory districts—where the conditions as to internal migrations are almost similar—we shall be amply repaid by the discovery that in such settlements the result of internal shiftings of population receives its clearest expression. Here, where the immigrant elements are most numerous, there develops between them and the native population a social struggle—a struggle for the best conditions of earning a livelihood or, if you will, for existence, which ends with the adaptation of one part to the other, or perhaps with the final subjugation of the one by the other. Thus, according to Schliemann, the city of Smyrna had in the year 1846 a population of 80,000 Turks and 8,000 Greeks; in the year 1881, on the contrary, there were 23,000 Turks and 76,000 Greeks. The Turkish portion of the population had thus in thirty-five years decreased by 71 per cent, while the Greeks had increased ninefold.

Not everywhere, to be sure, do those struggles take the form of such a general process of displacement; but in individual cases it will occur with endless frequency within a country that the stronger and better-equipped element will overcome the weaker and less well-equipped.

Thus we have here a case similar to that occurring so frequently in nature: on the same terrain where a more highly organized plant or animal has no longer room for subsistence, others less exacting in their demands take up their position and flourish. The coming of the new is in fact not infrequently the cause of the disappearance of those already there and of their withdrawal to more favorable surroundings.

If these considerations show that by no means the majority of internal migrations find their objective point in the cities, they at the same time prove that the trend toward the great centers of population can, in itself be looked upon as having an extensive social and economic importance. It produces an alteration in the distribution of population throughout the state; and at its originating and objective points it gives rise to difficulties which legislative and executive authority has hitherto labored, usually with but very moderate success, to overcome. It transfers large numbers of persons almost directly from a sphere of life where barter predominates into one where money and credit exchange prevail, thereby affecting the social conditions of life and the social customs of the manual laboring classes in a manner to fill the philanthropist with grave anxiety.

3. Demographic Segregation and Social Selection[190]

There are two ways in which demographic crystallization may have taken place. A people may have become rigid horizontally, divided into castes, or social strata; or it may be geographically segregated into localized communities, varying in size all the way from the isolated hamlet to the highly individualized nation. Both of these forms of crystallization are breaking down today under the pressure of modern industrialism and democracy, in Europe as well as in America.

The sudden growth of great cities is the first result of the phenomenon of migration which we have to note. We think of this as essentially an American problem. We comfort ourselves in our failures of municipal administration with that thought. This is a grievous deception. Most of the European cities have increased in population more rapidly than in America. This is particularly true of great German urban centers. Berlin has outgrown our own metropolis, New York, in less than a generation, having in twenty-five years added as many actual new residents as Chicago, and twice as many as Philadelphia. Hamburg has gained twice as many in population since 1875 as Boston; Leipzig has distanced St. Louis. The same demographic outburst has occurred in the smaller German cities as well. Beyond the confines of the German Empire, from Norway to Italy, the same is true.

Contemporaneously with this marvellous growth of urban centers we observe a progressive depopulation of the rural districts. What is going on in our New England states, especially in Massachusetts, is entirely characteristic of large areas in Europe. Take France, for example. The towns are absorbing even more than the natural increment of country population; they are drawing off the middle-aged as well as the young. Thus great areas are being actually depopulated.