Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/55

 itself against change of circumstances and agitations by substantial firmness and rigidity of form rather than by pliable adaptation and quickly effected alteration of attitudes.

In the case of political constitutions, an additional element of essential importance is that the foundation of their social form upon that stratum which is most extensive and in which rights are most equal occurs chiefly among agricultural peoples—the old Roman peasant class and the old German community of free men are cases in point. Here the action of the social form is prejudiced by content of social interests. The cultivator of the soil is a priori conservative. His occupation requires long terms, abiding arrangements, resolute persistency. The uncertainties of the weather, upon which his fortunes hang, incline him to a certain fatalism, which shows itself, with respect to external powers, rather in enduring than in evading. His processes cannot be made to confront changes of conjunctions with such quick qualitative modifications as those of manufacturer or merchant. The technical conditions, therefore, create for groups whose form-maintenance is identical with that of a chiefly agricultural mass the disposition to procure this maintenance by firmness and persistence, not by variability of their life processes.

It is quite otherwise in case the middle class has undertaken leadership and the social form of the group stands or falls with the predominance of this middle class. This middle class alone has both an upper and a lower boundary. This is of such a sort that individuals are constantly brought within it both from the higher and from the lower class, and other individuals go from the middle class in either direction. The character of fluctuation is impressed on this stratum, therefore, and the appropriateness of its attitude will, therefore, be in large measure an appropriateness of adaptations, variations, concessions, through which the inevitable movement of the whole may be at least so guided or opposed that the essential form and force of the group may remain throughout all change of conditions. We may designate the sociological form of a group which is characterized by the extension and prevalence of a middle class as that of continuity.