Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/217

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 205

way back to the common civic level. Even the government felt that their two fundamental principles equality within the aristocracy and the sub- ordination of the power of the magistrates to the senatorial college began in this instance to give way in their hands.

Venice, after enjoying popular government for ten centuries, was brought under an oligarchy in consequence of expanded con- quests and incessant wars. Nor are the reactions of the Britannic dominion upon English politics of a different kind. Says Mr. Hobson :

As the despotic portion of our Empire has grown in area, a larger and larger number of men, trained in the temper and methods of autocracy as soldiers and civil officials in our Crown colonies, protectorates, and Indian Empire, reinforced by numbers of merchants, planters, engineers, and over- seers, whose lives have been those of a superior caste .... have returned to this country bringing back the characters, sentiments, and ideas imposed

by this foreign environment Everywhere they stand for coercion and

resistance to reform.

Even if clamped together by force, two societies, nevertheless, gradually assimilate and provided their racial differences be not too great a process of equalization sets in which causes the original social individualities to disappear in a higher synthesis. It was the irresistible demand for this social equilibration that set aside the old oligarchic Roman republic in favor of the empire. By Caesar's statesmanship

Italy was converted from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise and a guarantee that .... every Latinized district might expect to be placed on an equal footing by the side of its- elder sisters and of the mother herself. On the threshold of full national and political equalization with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized. In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces of the empire in which .... the great maritime cities .... now became Italian or Hellene-Italian communities, the centers of an Italian civilization even in the Greek East, the fundamental pillars of the future national and political equalization of the empire.

The conjugation of two peoples by conquest and superposition is still more fecund in social transformations, inasmuch as the parasitic nexus established between lords and subjects calls into being peculiar relations, structures, and institutions. The inter-