Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/361

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 347

It is this fact of community which has most enforced the organic concept in its essential features. The universality and intimacy of relations between men is a fundamental element in social theory. It is not a fact completely distinct from the facts already pointed out, but it is a distinguishable aspect of those facts. Whatever be the relations that press upon some men, those relations are a part of the lot of all men. The oppression of the Jews in Russia and of the Armenians in Tur- key becomes a make-weight in the politics of England and America. The difficulties of farmers in East Prussia help make the "eastern question" in China, and threaten the Monroe doc- trine in South America. The local politics in Ireland may hold the balance between parties in the United States. The state of crops in Russia is reflected in prices on the Chicago board of trade. It would be possible to rewrite history in terms of this single condition. Of course, it would be a one-sided view of history, but it would correctly report one of the correlations of facts that is involved in history. We might urge the thesis : " History is the incessant distribution of conditions from centers where they are evident to the rest of society in which they are gradually assimilated and lost from view." The classic illustra- tion would be the political absolutism of the eighteenth century, as affected by the French Revolution. The revolution was in one sense local to France ; in another sense it re-created the world. It is doubtful if the spirit of French administration has been changed more than that of Germany by the assimilation of the Revolution by each. Again, we might review the different classes of satisfactions, and the activities which appetite for them stimulates, and we should find that the desires of one part of the world, and the means of satisfying them, presently become equated with the same class of desires and satisfactions in all the rest of the world. The health of Calcutta and the Arabian peninsula is presently the health of London and New York. The commercial system of Asia, Africa, and South America is both cause and effect of the commercial and fiscal system of England and America. The social customs of the Bushmen and Fuegians may not supplant those of European nations, but they