Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/693

 SOCIOLOGY AND THE STATE 679

"false start." In his first attack upon it, published in a news- paper, and containing low appeals to popular prejudice, he simply repeated the old charges that have been so often made by the authors named at the beginning of this paper, and I was surprised that any answer was thought necessary. But the answer made him familiar with the face of the monster and lured him on to express his pity in a second attack, much subdued, in which at last he showed his colors, and advanced the astounding theory above stated. He has thus been good enough to tell the sociologists what they should have done and what a true "start" would have been. What might not sociology have been if it had only made this true start!

The comedy of all this lies in the fact that we now have a rational theory of the state. Morgan taught us in 1878 that political society supervened upon tribal society in Greece and Rome in the sixth century before Christ, and that it does not exist in most of the outlying races of men. Nothing that can be called a state exists in gentile society, and the state is a com- paratively late factor in social evolution. Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer have shown us just how the state arose as a conse- quence of race amalgamation. The ethnological and sociological proofs, although independently arrived at, harmonize completely and furnish us with the true natural history of the state. They teach us the origin in comparatively recent times of political society, states, and nations, as the result of prolonged struggles followed by periods of social and political equilibration and assimilation.

The state is the most important of all human institutions, and it is doubtless a recognition of this truth that has led to the in- numerable attempts to explain its origin and nature. Some of the theories put forth may contain germs of truth, but the greater part of them are utterly worthless, as embodying no principle capable of explaining anything. Every writer imagined himself competent to formulate a theory of the state. I made bold to enter the lists in my initial work,*^ which appeared in 1883. I was culpably ignorant of Morgan's great work published five

"Dynamic Sociology, VoL I, pp. 464-67; Vol. II, pp. 212 if.