Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/554

538 first superiority of attraction, assimilation, and consequently superiority of life and development. And he concludes that the peaceful organization of the social forces ought finally to predominate over their military organization, and consequently break up the military frontiers. In the same sense he is a partisan of the abolition of the economic frontiers between peoples, i. e., of the customs duties. In a word, "it is not necessary to place the limits of a people in entirely material frontiers, nor the strength of a kingdom in the obstacles of mountains and water-courses that face the enemy, nor the imposing majesty of the empire in a great military equipment." Nothing is truer. Moreover, mere formulæ and proclamations concerning the substitution of peace for war do not suffice. War is always a form of unstable equilibrium of the life of societies, but an onerous, violent, and brutal form. The problem submitted to science is to discover the positive conditions of peaceful organization capable of giving satisfaction to the necessities of order within the variations which constitute the accompaniment of all living existence. It is necessary, therefore, that the internal organization of every society be adjusted continuously to the variations which are spontaneously produced inside and outside of itself. To disarm is good, to organize peace is better.

Thus it is reserved to sociology to embrace the question in its integrality and to show that the problem of frontiers and war is inseparable from the internal reform of the people. Every organization has an inclosure the most advantageous to its existence within the conditions in which it is placed. Its exterior structure responds to the interior structure. An armor of steel harmonizes no more with a thinker than a circle of fortresses and cannon with a society whose life, like that of the thinker, has become universal.

If from China we pass into India, we observe at first glance the apparent regularity of the natural or rather geographical divisions of the vast peninsula. At the south, the west, and the east, deep seas; at the northwest, the Indus; and behind that, the lofty mountains separating India from western Asia. But between the two slopes of these mountains exist some pretty