Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/620

 604 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

vast process of universal social integration, but I cannot leave the subject without repeating what I have said before: that if we could but peer far enough into the great future, we should see this planet of ours ultimately peopled with a single homo- geneous and completely assimilated race of men the human race in the composition of which could be detected all the great commanding qualities of every one of its racial components. And I will also add that to the subsequent duration of this final race on the earth there are no assignable limits.

But we are considering social structure and not social integra- tion, although these are intimately bound up together. We have seen how social structures are formed. The spontaneous products of a great cosmical law, they could not be other than thoroughly organized, firm, compact, and durable mechanisms, comparable to organic structures tissues, organs, organisms. This is the most important lesson taught by the science of sociology. If all the world could learn it, the greater part of all political and social failures would be prevented. It would dispel at one blow all the false notions so widely current relative to the alteration, abolition, or overthrow of any human institution. As human institutions are the products of evolution, they cannot be destroyed, and the only way they can be modified is through this same process of evolu- tion. Universal acquaintance with the causes, the laws, and the natural history of social structures, and with their consequent durability, permanence, and indestructibility, would produce a complete change in all the prevailing ideas of reform, and the superficial reformers, however well-meaning, would forthwith abandon their chimerical schemes, and set about studying the science of society with a view to the adoption of legitimate means for the direction of the course of social evolution toward the real and possible modification and perfecting of social structures. For structures are easily modified by appropriate methods. They are of themselves always undergoing changes. It is in this that social progress wholly consists. But the integrity of the struc- tures must not be disturbed. They must remain intact and be permitted, or even caused, to change in the desired direction, and to be ultimately transformed into the ideal human institutions