198 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
value of money will be altered in both, and the equilibrium between borrowers and lenders, capitalists and producers, may be ruptured. The access of persons to a society may disturb the balance of power between classes and leave a mark on institutions. Maine points out that the afflux of fugitives and broken men, fuidhuirs, enabled the Irish chief to fill the waste lands of his tribe with dependents who, being tenants-at-will and rack-rentable, seriously and permanently altered for the worse the position of the tribes- men who held stock of the chief and paid him rent. Likewise in Orissa :
So long as the land on an estate continued to be twice as much as the hereditary peasantry could till, the resident husbandmen were of too much importance to be bullied or squeezed into discontent. But once a large body of immigrant cultivators had grown up, this primitive check on the landlord's exactions was removed.
The immense nineteenth-century outflow of West-Europeans of whom more than twenty millions came to the United States alone in eighty years has had a great share in the recent trans- formations of European societies. The settling of vast fertile tracts coupled with the introduction of steam transportation developed an over-sea competition which has depressed agricul- tural profits in the Old World and diminished the share of the produce going to the landlord. The wages and status of labor have been raised partly by the migration of his competitors, partly by cheaper food supplies and the springing up of manu- facturing industries to supply the needs of the over-sea popula- tions. The rent receiver has prospered less than the laborer and the capitalist, with the consequence that the political and social domination of the land-owning class is becoming a thing of the past, and the laws are written in the statute-book by the capitalist with some prompting from the laborer. Here is one cause at least of that seeming inevitableness of democracy which has mystified those philosophers who imagine that social destinies are settled solely by conflicts of ideas.
On the other hand, if enlarged interchanges of goods and of men should cause the cogs of Orient and Occident to engage until they form one economic system, there would ensue a rjedis-
