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and since the English-speaking people has continued to grow more strong, more united, more dominant upon the earth, we may believe that it has, upon the whole, through many errors, chosen its crimes rightly, and that it will continue to be, through coming years, the great teacher of Christianity and of civilization.1

1 A crime and a form of crime express two closely related yet diverse ideas, between which we should distinguish clearly. A crime is an act, the act of a criminal, punished by society as a wrong against itself. A form of crime is a kind of conduct which society would punish in this manner, if the act were perpetrated, if the criminal existed. Thus treason is and has always been (as far back as we can trace) a most heinous form of crime among men. Throughout the centuries acts of treason have been very frequent, and severely punished as crimes; but among lowest savage hordes and the most highly civilized modern nations we find almost no instances of punishment for this offense. The traitor has practically disappeared from the English criminal statistics during the last half century, and abhorrence of the traitorous act is so intense among lowest savages that no one is found to commit this most heinous of crimes. A form of conduct may therefore be criminal without the actual infliction of social punishment, but such instances are very rare. Piracy is an example for modern times.

We may dream of a nation, in some future age, when even a new form of crime may not necessarily mean an increase of criminals. With us, the transgressor is so very natural and customary a result of the prohibition that we expect him as a matter of course, and are never pleasantly disappointed by his nonappearance. He is not, however, an absolutely inevitable social product, provided knowledge, intelligence, and morality are high and strong enough, and the habit of obedience dominant enough in the social group.

XXVIII

MALE SEXUAL SELECTION1

Before proceeding to consider the various forms of marriage, it will be necessary to advert to a very important biological fact which has constituted one of the results of the development in man of his greatly superior psychic faculties. This fact is what may be called male sexual selection, or the transfer to the male sex of the sexual selective power exercised in the lower animals and in primordial man by the female.

The higher a being rises in the scale of development, the more sensitive become all its faculties and organs. Just as the raw pabulum of animals will not suffice for man, and the rude preparation of food by the savage fails to satisfy the more refined palate of civilized man, so the development and refinement of all the faculties of man in his gradual emergence out of animality into humanity, and his elevation from barbarism to civilization, lead him more and more to select his companions as well as his food, and beget preferences in the objects of sexual as well as of gustatory and all other species of gratification. Much as may be, and doubtless is, due to the effects of the selection of the female sex in effecting morphological changes, it is still to the selection of the male sex that must be ascribed the greater part of those sociological phenomena which belong to the domain of the reproductive forces.

In fact, it is here that is to be detected one of the few distinct and tangible facts which serve to separate man from the brute creation. According to the law just enunciated, by which increased intelligence manifests itself in the direction of the subjection of woman to man, her power of selection, so freely and constantly exercised in the animal state, is taken away, and

1 From Dynamic Sociology, by Lester F. Ward, Vol. I, pp. 613-615 (copy. right, 1898, by D. Appleton & Co., New York).

she loses that supremacy which she formerly held. Then, and throughout the animal world, the female sex controlled the male in all matters pertaining to sex, haughtily declining and successfully rejecting the advances of the latter when not reciprocated. But the female of the human race has lost this scepter, has yielded to the cunning appeals of her male companion to her imagination and her reason, and little by little surrendered both her mind and body to his control. Once she ruled over him by reason of his passion, which prompted him to make perpetual demands upon her for the favor that she alone could confer ; now he rules over her body and soul by reason of a thousand desires within her, which prompt her to make perpetual demands upon him, as lord of the universe, for that protection and those favors which he alone can confer. The transition from the animal to the human state has wrought a complete revolution in all the sexual relations, and transferred the selective power absolutely from the female to the male sex. In no other department has there been so great a reversal of natural law.

This important fact of the transition, in man alone of all animals, from female to male selection may not only be plainly seen in its direct results, but is significantly attested in certain of its indirect ones. Among others, it is interesting to observe that just as the form of sexual selection is the opposite in man from what it is in the lower animals, so, as indeed might be expected, the male beauty, due to female selection in the latter, becomes female beauty due to male selection in the former, fact which at once affords a striking proof of this transition, and of the modifying power of the selective process.

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It is interesting to note that here again, as so many times. before, we see in the progress of true civilization the unmistakable tendency toward the ultimate restoration of the primeval state of nature. Once more the cyclical character of our artificial social system is clearly revealed. Even in our own times we are beginning to observe the most unmistakable signs of the eventual resumption by woman of her lost scepter, and of her restoration to that empire over the emotional nature of man which the females of nearly all other animals exercise.

XXIX

ETHNIC STRATIFICATION AND URBAN

SELECTION 1

The extreme fluidity of our heterogeneous population is impressed upon us by every phenomenon of social life here in America. We imagine the people of Europe, on the other hand, after scores of generations of stable habitation, to have settled themselves permanently and contentedly into place. This is an entirely erroneous assumption. As a matter of fact, they are almost as mobile as our own American types. 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 to-day under the pressure of modern industrialism and democracy, in Europe as well as in America. Nor is it true that the recency of our American social life has made the phenomena of change more marked here than abroad. In fact, with the relics of the old régime on every hand, the present tendencies in Europe are the more startling of the two by reason of the immediate contrast. Demographic processes are at work which promise mighty results for the future. These are not cataclysmic, like the French Revolution; but being well-nigh universal, the fact that they are slow moving should not blind us to their ultimate effects. Such movements threaten to break up not only the horizontal social stratification but the vertical geographical cleavage of locality and nationality as well. Obviously any disturbance of these at once involves destruction of the racial individuality of the continent at the same time. For 1 From The Races of Europe, by William Z. Ripley, chap. xx (copyright, 1899 by D. Appleton & Co., New York).

this reason, many phases of social analysis appertain directly to the sphere of natural science. The anthropologist and sociologist alike are called upon to take cognizance of the same phenomena. The physical and social sciences are equally involved in the determination of their laws. Certain problems of city life are foremost among these questions which lie on the border line between what were once widely separated sciences.

The most conservative societies in Europe are really to-day a seething mass of moving particles, viewed with the statistical eye. To borrow a familiar figure, a great population almost anywhere is like the atmosphere; even when apparently most quiescent, in the sunlight of investigation revealing itself surcharged with myriad notes in ceaseless agitation. These particles, microscopic or human, as the case may be, are swept along in currents determined both in their direction and intensity by definite causes. With men, the impelling forces are reducible mainly to economic and social factors. Most powerful of these movements of population to-day is the constant trend from the rural districts to the city. Its origin is perfectly apparent. Economically it is induced by the advantages of coöperation in labor; perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say, by the necessity of aggregation imposed by nineteenth-century industrialism. This economic incentive to migration to the towns is strengthened by the social advantages of urban life, the attractions of the crowd; often potent enough in themselves, as we know, to hold people to the tenement, despite the opportunity for advancement, expansion, or superior comfort afforded elsewhere outside the city walls. The effect of these two combined motives, the economic plus the social, is to produce a steady drift of population toward the towns. This has a double significance. It promises to dissolve the bonds of geographical individuality, nay, even of nationality; for a political frontier is no bar against such immigration, provided the incentive be keen enough. At the same time it opens the way for an upheaval of the horizontal or social stratification of population, since in the city advancement or degradation in the scale of living are alike possible, as never in the quiet life of the country.

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