Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/36

 22 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

race constitutes one society, every individual is, by the law of nature, bound to show a friendly spirit toward all others, even though strangers, and to be ever ready to assist them, in time of need, with his own labor or goods, mora! or material, so far as this is possible without neglect of duty, or disproportionate injury to his own family or business. The obligation of mutual assistance, while inseparable from the participation of a com- mon humanity, becomes more imperative in proportion to the nearness of the parties concerned, by ties of blood, nationality, faith, profession, propinquity, or dependence, reaching its maxi- mum force in the case of the members of the same household and family.

While many hints of the normal order of society are to be found in the institutions, laws, and customs of all pagan nations, yet these almost universally display many dislocations, as it were, and fatal perversions and misdirections, which show the accumulated effects of the primordial lesion in human nature, and the subsequent follies and crimes of man. In the pagan world the whole of society is held to exist, or at least is usually exploited in practice, for the benefit of the stronger, wealthier, wiser, more numerous, or otherwise better-equipped classes. This is a direct reversal of the Christian principle, which is formulated by Professor G. Toniolo, one of the most powerful living exponents of Christian social reform, in the following language :

Society exists in a special manner for the comfort and relief of the fee- ble and the most numerous ; and the generic duty of all to lend themselves to the common good implies the specific duty of those individuals, of those classes, of those normal and legal entities, which, by whatever title, are in possession of a social superiority, to dedicate themselves, in a special man- ner, to the guardianship and elevation of the inferior classes.'

The weak do not exist for the sake of the powerful, nor sub- jects for the sake of the rulers ; but the powerful, and the rulers, and those who are in any way superior, exist for the sake of those who are in a state of weakness, or subjection, or inferiority,

■ // Concetto Cristiano della Democrazia, estratto dalla Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali e Disciplint AusUiarie (Roma: Tipografia dell' Unione Cooperativa Editrice, Via di Porta Salaria 23 A, 1897), p. 13.