Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/419

 those subordinated to him, is sometimes regarded as more tolerable, more useful, more desirable, and again as more oppressive, more obstructive, and more unworthy. In a precisely corresponding way is subordination to a stranger, or a person outside the group, contradictorily valued. In Germany in the Middle Ages the feudal lords at first had the right to name at will judges and leaders from abroad for the people attached to their estate. At length, however, the latter often won the concession that the official should be taken from within their own circle. At the same time Italian cities, on the contrary, followed the principle of procuring their judges from distant cities. This divergence, viz., estimate of control by a stranger, now as lighter, now as severer, than control by one who is nearer, has certain utilitarian justifications. The stranger is less partisan, the member of the group is more intelligent about its conditions. But these consciously rational grounds not only fail entirely in many cases, but, since they are in principle of equal value, the decision between them requires a higher ground, which is always instinctive. This is due to the fact that this question is a side issue of the great psychical dualism—the equality of both attraction and repulsion by like and by unlike. According as the one tendency or the other is psychically predominant, will the group prefer to subordinate itself to one of its own or to a stranger. As a matter of fact it is wholly an affair of feeling, which cannot be rationalized, whether one seems to himself more humiliated by subordination to one who is near or to one farther removed. In general we may say that the lower a group stands as a whole, the more each individual member is accustomed to subordination, the less willingly will they suffer themselves to be controlled by one of their own; the higher the group stands, the more likely it will be to subordinate itself to one of its peers alone. This feeling at its highest power has been exhibited by the House of Lords, which will not merely be recognized by every peer as his only judge, but in 1330 expressly repelled the insinuation that they wished to sit in judgment upon others than their peers. So decided is thus the tendency