Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/88

 72 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the application of a uniform law, and of a strongly centralized political and administrative regulation. The "great Roman peace " was a period unique in the history of human societies, at least in a civilization on so large a scale. The citizens of this Roman world might well have cherished the illusion that this world did not have frontiers, since they were so distant, and any conflicts which arose with the regions beyond made so little impression in the central regions. What they could not see was that not only at the exterior did Roman civilization have its limits, not merely military or political properly speaking, and still others more or less extended than the military limits; but that in the interior of Roman society an enormous differentiation of the functions of social life was taking place in correlation with the development of territorial extension and of the mass of the population. This differentiation of the functions of social life had necessitated an adequate organic differentiation, and conse- quently an enormous multiplication of structures and internal delimitations unknown and non-existent before. If Roman development had been simply a development in mass and in extent, without internal organic differentiation, it would have had no interest for the historian and the sociologist. But the evolu- tion of the frontiers of Roman civilization was always correlated with its internal evolution. The two were in continuous and variable equilibration, and there was at the same time progressive adjustment with the exterior world.

Then as now the political theorists and the philosophers, con- sidering chiefly the most apparent external aspect the frontier in its purely military and political factors, which is like the pro- tective shell of all the internal portions of this great social body, the envelope of which they even lost consciousness in proportion to its distance from the superior centers, and also losing from view that this envelope is not only an organ of separation and of defense, but also an organ of relation and of adaptation with the exterior world whose existence they ignored fell into complete idealism. They arrived at the absolute negation of frontiers, at universal equality and fraternity, as though all barriers, all inequalities, not merely physical and ethnical, but social, had com-