Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/269

 THE THEORY CF COLONIZATION 253

and all that is characteristic of the old community, would spring up in the new as a transplanted flower or tree blossoms or fruits in new soil.

There is no little truth in both views. Under the mask of twentieth-century civilization, which plunges gaily into state socialism, produces Utopian romances of the highest quality, idol- izes Paderewski, and is pround of its agnosticism, there is much in contemporary colonies that is primitive in the conditions of life, the pursuits and occupations, the passions of the soul, and even the religious views. On the other hand, the earlier stages of col- onization are sometimes more truly reproductive of the mental level of the motherland at the time when the colony was founded than later generations always witness. The earlier legislatures and ministries in New England, Australia, and New Zealand far surpassed, in the quality of their members, their degenerate successors. Picked men when they emigrated, sometimes gradu- ates and savants, enthusiasts and philanthropists, the first colon- ists often carried with them a degree of culture to which their sons and grandsons are strangers.

The truth lies in a blending of the two views. An emigrant community that settles in a new country, where it has to battle with adverse physical conditions and hostile indigenes, undergoes an inevitable degeneration. It has to begin life afresh and pass through all the stages of collective infancy, childhood, and youth, with all their imperfections. But it also starts with new oppor- tunities and new hopes. Usually a variant on the motherland, formed of progressive elements that were too rebellious to be successfully reared in the old soil, the colony enters on a new career, with potentialities of development that could hardly have been realized in the old land. It is a new and improved social organism that has been generated.

Agassiz was among the first to discover the resemblance be- tween ancient or extinct members of certain species and the embryonic forms of recent or contemporary members of similar species; and he generalized the luminous conception by suggest- ing that the chain of extinct forms runs parallel with the succes- sive phases of the embryo in existing forms. With the instinct