Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/684

 668 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Vaudois valleys. They also mingled with the original elements. Today peaceful immigration still continues, introducing new ele- ments, already strongly mixed themselves, of Germans, Poles, and Russians. If in western Ireland, in a part of the Scotch Highlands, in the mountains of Wales, and in Cornwall the old Celtic type still predominates, while on the eastern coast the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes are dominant; if, farther inland from Hertford above London to Durham south of New- castle, the Scandinavian element is very considerable, can one seriously attempt to trace at the present time the frontiers based upon the ethnic characters of different populations, or indeed upon the geographical divisions of territory, when the whole his- tory of civilization in the British Isles has evolved through the leveling of geographical divisions, and the fusion of all the ethnic varieties? Military conquest, with its odious and violent phases, notably in Ireland, was only the gross manifestation of this socio- logical law of progress which, after having permitted the human race to colonize the planet through ethnic differentiations, now completes its work by weakening these differentiations, and yet at the same time multiplying them still more extensively through the mingling of all the varieties and subvarieties of the human species, and especially by the increasing division of social tasks a divi- sion which becomes more and more the positive basis of collective groupings, from the smallest to the most considerable, but all equally, and better and better, co-ordinated and fused together. Here is to be found the law of progress, and not in the vain and reactionary attempts at the reconstitution of old ethnical group- ings, whether in relation or not to certain geographical frontiers. They deceive themselves who are continually talking about the isolation of England within her island. This isolation existed, if it ever existed, in prehistoric times. On the contrary, through its situation, England placed herself in the vanguard of Europe; and, better still, from the Middle Ages she was the meeting-place, the mart, of all the Continental Occident. There, too, broke the winds and waves from America; ships had only to follow the direction from southwest to northeast on the return voyage; just as in going to America they had only to let themselves be carried