Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/602

 its claim to what we call our patriotism. A feeling of brotherhood and fellowship, of which in ordinary times the traces are as sadly scarce among compatriots as those who are foreigners to each other, rises, in moments of public danger, from the bottoms of our souls in effervescent bubbles. The feeling, to be sure, is more of the nature of an emotion than of a lasting sentiment. Our normal relations toward our present societies and states must not be taken as being accommodated to this extraordinary standard. They are, howsoever men may boast of their patriotism, generally of a calm and calculating character. We look upon the state, represented as it is by its government, as upon a person who stands in contractual rather than in sentimental relations to ourselves. Certainly this view is more or less developed in different countries, under different circumstances, with different individuals. But it is the one that is indorsed by the most advanced and the most conscious members of modern societies, by those powerful individuals who feel themselves as masters of their own social relations. Societies and states are chiefly institutions for the peaceful acquisition, and for the protection, of property. It is therefore the owners of property to whom we must look when we are inquiring into the prevailing and growing conceptions of society and of the state. Now, it cannot be doubted that they do not consider either society or the state as representing that early community which has always been supposed to be the original proprietor of the soil and of all its treasures, since this would imply that their own private property had only a derivative right—derived from the right and law of public property. It is just the opposite which they think and feel: the state has a derivative right of property by their allowance and their contributions; the state is supposed to act as their mandatary. And it is this view which corresponds to the facts. A modern state—it is by no means always the youngest states that are the most characteristic types of it—has little or no power over property.

I cannot refrain from quoting here, as I have done elsewhere, a few sentences of the eminent American sociologist, Mr. Lewis Morgan,