Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/878

 864 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

This law may be stated in accordance with our verification of it in the following form: "The dolichocephalic members of a community are more apt than the brachy- cephalic members to choose their spouses outside of the residents of their own birth- place."

7. Law of the concentration of the dolichoids. "In the dissociation of the ele- ments of population the migratory elements are attracted to the centers of doli- chocephaly." Migrants belong to the dolichoid element. Cities and the more fertile regions are populated by dolichoids. That which attracts the second dolichoid is that which attracts the first. " It is the more intense desire, characteristic of Homo Europ<rus, for an active and influential career and for a cultivated life."

8. Law of urban elimination. " Urban life acts as an agency of selection in favor of the dolichoids and destroys or rejects the most brachycephalic elements."

9. Law of stratification. "The cephalic index is lower and the proportion of dolichocephalic greater among the higher classes than among the lower classes in each community."

10. Law of the intellectual classes. "Among intellectual workers the absolute dimensions of the head, and particularly the breadth, are greater than the average."

11. Law of epochs. " Since prehistoric times the cephalic index has everywhere and constantly tended to increase." The length of the head has tended, and still tends, to decrease and the breadth in general to increase.

" The laws enumerated above are obviously closely connected and tend to merge one into another. It appears that they may properly be regarded as the detailed and partial statements of various phases of one general law, formulated by Closson and designated by him as the

12. Law of Lapouge, viz., the law of the greater activity of Homo Europaus." GEORGES PACHKR DE LAPOUGE, The Journal of Political Economy, December, 1897.

The Study of the Negro Problems. "A social problem is a failure of an organized social group to realize its group ideals, through the inability to adopt a cer- tain desired line of action to given conditions of life." It is ever a relation between conditions and action, and varies as they vary. Hence social problems change, develop, and grow.

"Given any fixed condition or fact a river Nile, a range of Alps, an alien race, or a national idea and problems of society will at every stage of advance group themselves about it. All social growth means a succession of social problems they constitute growth, they denote that laborious and often baffling adjustment of action and condition which is the essence of progress."

Negro problems are evinced by the fact that a definitely segregated mass of eight millions of Americans do not wholly share the national life of the people and are not an integral part of the social body. " The points at which they fail to be incorporated into this group life constitute the particular negro problems, which can be divided into two distinct but correlated parts, depending on two facts :

" First Negroes do not share the full national life, because as a mass they have not reached a sufficiently high grade of culture.

" Secondly They do not share the full national life, because there has always existed in America a conviction varying in intensity, but always widespread that people "of negro blood should not be admitted into the group life of the nation, no matter what their condition might be. The mass of this race does not reach the social standards of the nation with respect to economic condition, mental training, and social efficiency.

" The great deficiency of the negro, however, is his small knowledge of the art of organized social life that last expression of human culture. His development in group life was abruptly broken off in the slave ship, directed into abnormal channels, and dwarfed by the Black Codes, and suddenly wrenched anew by the Emancipation Proclamation. He finds himself, therefore, peculiarly weak in that nice adaptation of individual life to the life of the group which is the essence of civilization."

Negro problems differ from all others in the fact that they are complicated by a peculiar environment, the essential element of which consists in the widespread