Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/810

 796 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

agricultural classes of India are the Hindus who were conquered by the Mohammedans ; these latter form the merchant and war- rior classes. The Helots of Sparta were the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, while the warriors and kings were the Dorians who subdued them. With the settlement of the two races side by side begins, spontaneously at first, the process of assimilation; first agglomeration, and then assimilation. Mere agglomeration begets assimilation, for in these early ages of his- tory, when society is just emerging from a tribal organization, all races are near enough alike to make the process of fusion com- paratively easy. Then there is no body of tradition strong enough to produce a race-consciousness sufficiently intense to prevent assimilation. That the classes after the establishment of social order find themselves nearer each other than were the hostile races before the conquest is due to the workings of spontaneous assimilation. Thus, does not the historical, civil- ized state arise through conquest? Burgess, however, has quite a different view of the subject. The state is a late development of the nation, he asserts, which must pass through many prelimi- nary stages in its development before it reaches the political organization or state. A nation he defines as "a population of an ethnic unity inhabiting a territory of a geographic unity." By ethnic unity he means a population having a common lan- guage and literature, common custom, and common conscious- ness of rights and wrongs. 1 But, pray, how was this ethnic unity formed ? This Burgess does not explain. Now, the estab- lishment of such a unity was possible only through the assimila- tion which resulted from the conquest of one race by another, and this assimilation could be brought about only under political organization of some sort, or, in other words, the state. Social order was the necessary basis for social progress, and to social progress, caused largely by assimilation, the nation is due. 3

Spontaneous assimilation begins with race-contact, but the moment the governing class realizes that homogeneity will be advantageous it proceeds to bring it about by every possible

1 BURGESS, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, Vol. I, pp. 1-3. a On "Die Entstehung des Staates" see RATZENHOFER, pp. 156-64.