Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/790

 776 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

We know that the migrations of the natural races arc necessary and frequent, and the movements of the culture races have been even more complex. The leadership of these mass movements and spatial reaccommodations necessarily rests with the men, who, in their wanderings, have become acquainted with larger stretches of space, and whose specialty is motor coordination. The progressive races have managed the space problem best. At every favorable point they have pushed out their territorial boundaries or transferred their social activities to a region more favorable to their expansion. Under male leadership, in conse- quence, territory has become the prize in every conflict of races, the modern state is based not on blood but on territory, and territory is at present the reigning political ideal.

In the process of coming into control of a larger environ- ment through the motor activities of the male, the group comes into collision with other groups within which the same move- ment is going on, and it then becomes a question which group can apply force more destructively and remove or bring under control this human portion of its environment. Military organi- zation and battle afford the grand opportunity for the individual and mass expression of the superior force-capacity of the male. They also determine experimentally which groups and which individuals are superior in this respect, and despotism, caste, and slavery are concrete expressions of the trial.

The nominal headship of woman within the maternal group existed only in default of forms of activity fit to formulate head- ship among the men, and when chronic militancy developed an organization among the males, the political influence of the female was completely shattered. At a certain point in history women became an unfree class, precisely as slaves became an unfree class because neither class showed a superior fitness on the motor side ; and each class is regaining its freedom because the race is substituting other forms of decision for violence.

WILLIAM I. THOMAS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.