33** THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
nation to any strong sympathetic emotions in their behalf. The other elements have learned to stand on their own feet in busi- ness, and to acknowledge the rights of more capable men, what- ever their race or religion.
One of the ablest portions of von Hoist's Constitutional His- tory of the United States is that in which he shows the impossibility of combining the social ideas on which slave labor was founded with free industry in the same political society. The dependence of economic activity on social conditions was never more clearly depicted. From the earliest details that the ethnologists collect of social decrees of the sex line in industry down to the distinc- tions between wholesale and retail trade as passports to different strata of polite society, history bristles with illustrations of the present thesis, namely: What economic activity may be is decided, not by economic interests alone, but invariably by conformity of economic action to internal and external social conditions. It was not our natural environment, but the colonial policy of Great Britain, that set limits to our industrial development .before the war of independence. Again, it was not our home resources, but the attitude of foreign nations toward our commerce, that crippled our trade until after the war of 1812. If it be answered that this was really one industrial society pitting itself against another industrial society, that it was thus an industrial conflict pure and simple, and so not a case in point, we may concede that this is largely, but not wholly, true. We may then cite the clearer instances of our long knocking at the door of China and Japan for admission of our trade. The exclusion of foreign nations from these countries was not primarily economic ; it was social. The objection to foreigners was not in the first instance opposition to foreign goods, but to foreign people. There was social antipathy which refused to mix with Europeans. So long as that antipathy existed, trade relations were impossible. In China the barrier has been broken down to a considerable extent by force. In Japan it has been removed from within as well as from without. And since the new social atmosphere has existed, new possibilities of economic action have arisen. Our present relations with Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines are not
