Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/105

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 93

colony the proportion between people and land is totally different from that. in the metropolis. Coming from an old, highly diver- sified and differentiated society, the colonists, owing to the abundance of their land, find themselves thrown back into the stage of extensive agriculture, or even of herdsmanship. More- over, being more favorable to production than to consumption, the colony attracts the active, but contains few persons living on incomes derived exclusively from ownership. For these reasons the new society by no means reproduces all the characteristics of the mother-society. Labor is honored. Achievement rather than enjoyment is its ideal of life. Vigor and efficiency are more esteemed than graces and refinements. The lack of cities, of intercourse, and of leisure is unfavorable to the cultivation of the sciences or the fine arts. The scarcity of labor may lead to the enslavement of weaker races. The community being little differentiated economically or socially, manhood rather than property controls the commonwealth, the temper is individualistic and liberty-loving, and popular institutions take root. Equality before the law is insisted on. Primogeniture is renounced. The state has little power to withstand public opinion. The spell of tradition is broken and the hereditary principle is weak. The spirit of society is either humanitarian or plutocratic, but not aristocratic.

Owing to the growth of numbers, however, such a society will in time approximate the mother-society, unless its early spirit is so crystallized in ideals and institutions as to control its later development. If, on the other hand, migration takes place to an unlike environment as when northerners occupy a tropical island, mountaineers descend to the seacoast, or a maritime people removes to an inland plateau the new social development may be quite tangent to the old. Here the chief transforming factor is not Climate or Aspect of Nature working directly on people, but radical change of occupation, working first on habits and ideas, and then on social relationships and institutions. What the direction of variation will be it is, of course, impossible to predict, unless the nature of the new environment is specified.

EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross.

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA.

[To be concluded.]