marked degree; for instance, in cases where the secret societies dominate the tribal life. It is a debatable question as to whether the imitation of the powerful is very thoroughgoing. This matter involves certain principles which will be met under the topic of transmission of the mores. But certainly all rights are not legal rights secured by control over legislation, nor does legislation alone confer rights.

With our present limited power of penetration into the operation of societal forces there seems to be, in this mode of societal selection, a lack of that precision, exactitude, and finality characteristic of a nature-process. Certain classes may be thought prosperous, powerful, and influential upon the life of society, but those discriminated against in the outcome are not eliminated from all influence, let alone from life. Even the slaves modified the language one of the purest forms of the mores in the South. In Darwin's sexual selection the weaker male is not always destroyed, but simply to some degree excluded from passing on his qualities; and this sort of selection is regarded by Darwin as much less rigorous than natural selection. If that is so, then societal selection of 1 Sumner, "Folkways," §§ 135-141.

the order before us is still less effective; for the unsuccessful class is to a still less degree prevented from transmitting its qualities.

What is true of classes in the broader sense is true in their degree of lesser societal groupings which are formed with the idea, sometimes almost unconsciously held, of emphasizing and propagating certain aspects of the mores; as, for example, sects and parties. They all strive for a position in the societal organization which shall enable them to pursue or enforce their particular prosperity-policies or pet social schemes. They gain recognition or vogue, it may be, or they are selected out almost before they have taken form. The fact of selection in all such cases seems patent enough; and it is reasonably plain, for this stage of the argument, that the struggle of classes, resulting as it does in the exaltation of this or that group to an influential position, results in some extension of the corresponding type of mores.

But if the seat of the mores is in the "masses," as Sumner demonstrates,1 then we have not as yet sounded the depths of societal selection by considering the influence of this or that group 1 Sumner, "Folkways," §§ 52 ff.

which, for the time, has attained ascendancy. There may well be here an underlying, slowworking selection, which operates, when we come to understand it better, with no less precision and finality than its prototype in the organic field. We are but at the beginning of the scientific study of human society and the way for a long distance ahead is beset with all manner of difficulties unknown to natural science.

In any case, the whole process is in the societal realm and seems quite divorced from the organic. Selection as the result of armed conflict was not so far from the nature-process; but the characteristic modern form of selection in the mores, though under it lies the nature-process ready to act in extremis, is on a different plane and of a different mode.

CHAPTER IV

RATIONAL SELECTION

IT has been important to get before us the general nature of the social conflicts without which there could be no societal selection, and the fact that selection takes place as a result of those conflicts. The nature of this selection was clear enough when it was a case of physical conflict followed by the extirpation of the conquered; but when the conflicting groups went on living together and amalgamating, finally forming a peaceful union, there was a change in the mode of selection which clearly distinguished it from natural selection and seemed to replace certitude and finality with vagueness and uncertainty. It is now desirable to clear up this uncertainty, if possible; and to do that it will be necessary to attack the matter from a new angle.

In organic evolution the sort of development that may take place is often largely a matter of what has already taken place; in a sense the

selection between variations is based upon the body of characters already assembled by the antecedent process. Certain lines of development are virtually shut off by reason of the direction along which the organism in question has evolved. The horse cannot now develop variations on the basis of five digits. If nature could be regarded as choosing and as giving reason for the choice, she might be figured as saying: "This variation must not be favored because it is not in the line of previous development." Subsequent evolution is largely conditioned by antecedent evolution. In societal evolution, as it appears within the group and under conditions that do not allow of violence, it sometimes seems as if the only selective force were of this order; or, to put it in the terminology here used, as if the only selective force to be exercised over variations in the mores lies in the antecedent mores. The great body of the society moves on in an inert way, judging everything on the basis of code, rejecting this and accepting that, for the most part irrationally, its mind made up for it by the traditional mores of the group. If this were strictly true, then societal evolution must have remained almost in abeyance since the formation of these