NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 273
the earth's population. History reveals it in numerous instances. Witness the Amer- ican Indian melting away before the onward march of the whites.
When we turn to examine what is going on within any race, it is difficult to decide what natural selection is doing. It is apparently much more active in preserv- ing than in changing types. People of conspicuous intellectual and moral power on the one hand and the degraded classes on the other are not as prolific as the intermediate class. The races of men undergo, no doubt, more or less organic transformation, but this must act very slowly. " It has little to do with the rise, spread, and decay of archi- tecture, music, painting, or poetry, or the great religious systems ; it is not the process by which governments become milder, popular education advances, and manners mel- iorate ; nor is it that by which new views prevail about childhood and the status of women."
The process which generates opinions, moral standards, and institutions rests upon the imitative, sympathetic, and intellectual faculties of man, and is related to natural selection through the probability of their having an evolutionary origin in which nat- ural selection acted as a factor. Man is a docile and conforming animal, and owes his power to his amenability. Conformity is a social discipline which levels up as well as down, and by so doing prevents crime as well as hindering genius. Social evolution rests primarily upon cooperation, which involves social discipline and individual amenability. Imitative and sympathetic human nature is a means to cooperation and so implies the process of social change. Variations from time to time occur and tend to be preserved by survival.
A continuous and progressive change in environment occurs. This changes the mechanism through which social influence acts and extends its range. " Society is a matter of the incidence of men upon one another," and this incidence is a matter of com- munication. With its extension an individual may select among several environments. It is upon the multiplicity of accessible influences and not upon radical change in human nature that present individual development differs from that of the past. Indi- viduality and society as above defined are mutually dependent and evolve side by side.
- ' The process of change that I have described involves selection, and is perhaps
as natural as anything else. Hence we may, if we choose, call it natural selection. It comes about through the competition of influences and the propagation of opportune innovations in thought and action. The selective principle, the arbiter of competition, is ever human nature, but human nature conditioned in its choices by the state of com- munication which determines what influences are accessible, as well as by the con- straining momentum of its own past." CHARLES H. COOLEY, Political Science Quar- terly, March 1897.
The Conflict of Races, Classes, and Societies. In a new environment the immigrants are assimilated by the native population. Both races, if of separate races, are united into one uniform group in accordance with the conditions of the environment.
Civilization is not conditioned by race. It is developed almost without relation to race. It passed from the south to the north in Europe without displacement of races. The decay of Rome began long before the northern barbarians exerted any influence. Venice has lost her commercial supremacy because her port was not suf- ficiently deep for modern ships. So we may affirm that intellectual development of an ethnographic race is due to causes quite foreign to the action of race.
Race classification is uncertain. The basis is either "color of the skin, form of the skull, religion, language, even a cross section of the hair," depending on the author. With such an uncertainty "how can we say that there has been a conflict of races?" "Conflict of races" implies that the individuals of a race are united or cohere for reacting against another race. " Now it is a fact of great importance that a race which in respect to another is not only physiologically and intellectually r, but inferior also in numbers, is able to live and prosper alongside of it. Then what becomes of this theory of the conflict of races."
It becomes more improbable when we realize that the various natural environ- ments form a gradation that never makes a leap or leaves a hiatus, and it is just so
