Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/588

 kind—maintaining itself by receiving its parts—as being a living whole or unity. This view is the more plausible if the renewal itself is merely biological, as indeed is the case in the human family, and, as we think, to a still greater extent—because a family soon disperses itself—in certain larger groups: a tribe, a nation, or a race; although there is involved in this view the question whether there is a sameness of nature—or, as we usually say, of blood—guaranteed, as it should be, by an in-and-in breeding of parents (German, Inzucht). Indeed, this self-conservation of a group is the less to be expected, the smaller the group; and it is well known among breeders that it is necessary for the life of a herd not to continue too long selecting sires of the same breed, but from time to time to refresh the blood by going beyond the limits of a narrow parentage, and crossing the race by mixtures with a different stock.

At any rate, this is what I should call a purely biological aspect of collective human life, in so far as their conception is restricted to the mere existence of a human group, which, so to speak, is self-active in its maintenance of life.

This aspect, however, does not suffice when we consider social units of a local character, which also continue their existence, partly in the same, but partly in a different manner. With reference to them we do not think exclusively of a natural Stoffwechsel, as it is effected by births and deaths of the individuals composing the body, but we also consider the moving to and fro of living men, women, and children, the ratio of which, like the ratio of births and deaths, may cause an increase or a decrease of the whole mass, and must cause one or the other if they do not balance. In consequence of this, we also have less reason to expect a biological identity of the stock of inhabitants at different times, than a lasting connection between a part of space (the place), or rather a piece of the soil, and a certain group of men who dwell in that place and have intercourse with each other, although the place itself grows with the number of its inhabitants, and although even among these inhabitants there be, for instance, not one direct descendant of those who occupied the place, say, a hundred years ago. We may, it is true, take it to be the rule