Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/358

 344 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

mass movements, and, not least of all, they are sapping and mining the foundations of supposed pillars of society by making many friends and champions in social classes whose lives move in entirely different lines. The social movement is thus more than a class movement. It includes among its active promoters people of all social strata, except perhaps the enormously rich, and even these do not always oppose the tendencies that I am describing. The social movement is popular in the most inclu- sive sense, i. e., it is made up of all sorts of people. Property is universally conservative, but in our day great property holders who on the whole sympathize with the main tendencies of the social movement are by no means rare. The social movement is thus not the inertia of the many slightly disturbed by the few, it is the momentum of the many, hardly restrained by all the arts that the few can contrive.

I said third, that the social movement has a new outlook. It may be defined in a word. The supreme purpose of life has some- times been to escape the wrath to come. People are today fleeing from the wrath that has come and they are frankly prospecting for happiness. We may argue with this state of things as we please, the fact remains. The social movement is a deliberate undertak- ing to get more satisfaction out of life than it has ever yielded. It is impelled by bold and stubborn presumption that men are fools not to be happy and comfortable in this world. There is not very much reckoning with the conditions of another world in the present social movement The idea is that there is a way to be physically and morally happy now if we can find it, and then the hereafter will take care of itself. This way of look- ing at things is not necessarily opposed to religion. It is opposed to all conceptions of religion which make it a matter of greater importance to dead men than to living ones.

It may be charged that if I have correctly described the social movement it is selfish and sordid and materialistic. That would be true in particular cases. It would not be true in general. I would rather say that the social movement is an effort for con- crete, specific, definable goods, without much attention to the