Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/100

 88 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

centers and regions. Manufactures and foreign trade will be stimulated. Redistributions of population will take place between country and city, between districts producing necessaries and districts that produce luxuries. The preponderating importance of capital enhances the sacredness of property in law and in morals, strengthens government as a property-protecting agency, and exalts the virtues of frugality and thrift.

At the same time, the enlarged consumption of goods tends to bring about certain social changes. Crime becomes less serious than vice, so that moral injunctions aim less to restrain men from aggression than to fortify them against the temptations to over- indulgence. Human depravity is doubted, and belief in future retribution dies out. The God of Fear yields to the God of Love. In worship, praise gains at the expense of prayer. To guide men, amid the greater variety of consumables, toward certain harmoni- ous groupings of goods, numerous standards of consumption are erected.

It is hardly to be expected, however, that in the accumula- tion of capital all portions of society will participate to the same degree. Some will distance others, and those who thus become differentiated from the rest in respect to possessions will eventu- ally segregate into a distinct social class. For capital is not merely economic power; it is latent social power. Those of superabundant wealth in time convert portions of it into political power, legal privileges, and invidious social preferences and exemptions, all serving to mark them off from the rest of the community. In other words, an aristocracy may originate, quite apart from conquest, quite apart from royal grace, in the mere fact of superior riches. "The heroes of the Homeric poems," says Maine, " are not only valiant, but wealthy ; the warriors of the Nibelungen Lied are not only noble, but rich. In the later Greek literature we find pride of birth identified with pride in seven wealthy ancestors." Among the ancient Irish the nobles are in seven grades, distinguished chiefly by wealth. At the bottom of the scale is the Aire-desa and "the Brehon law pro- vides that when the Bo-Aire has acquired twice the wealth of an Aire-desa and has held it for a certain number of generations, he