Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/182

 1 70 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

in all groups which count more than two elements, even where the mediator is not specially chosen, and is not, as such, particu- larly known or designated. The group of three is here only type and scheme. All cases of mediation finally reduce to its form. There is no community of threes, from the conversation for an hour up to family life, in which there does not presently occur dissension, now between this pair, now between that, harm- less or acute, momentary or permanent, of theoretical or practical nature, and in which the third does not exercise a mediatorial function. This occurs countless times in quite rudimentary ways, perhaps only in suggestive fashion, mixed with other actions and reciprocal relationships from which it is impossible to abstract the mediating function distinctly. Such mediations need not occur in words : a gesture, a way of listening, the quality of feeling which proceeds from a person, suffices to give to this dissent between two others a direction toward consensus, to make the essentially common underneath an acute difference of opinion perceptible, to bring this into the form in which it will most easily exert its proper influence. The issue need by no means be a real strife or struggle. It is rather the thousand easy varieties of opinion, the jarring of an antagonism of natures, the emergence of quite momentary antitheses of interest or feel- ing, which color the fluctuating form of every association, and is constantly modified in its course by the presence of the third party, who almost of necessity exercises the mediatorial function. This function passes around among the three elements in rotation, so to speak, since the ebb and flow of associated life constantly realize this form in the case of every possible com- bination of the elements.

The nonpartisanship demanded for mediation may have two sorts of pre-condition. The third party is nonpartisan if he is either beyond the interests and opinions which separate the others and is thus untouched by them, or if he shares in both in equal degrees. The former case is the simplest, and it involves the smallest number of complications. In conflicts between English laborers and employers, for example, a nonpartisan is often called in who must be neither laborer nor employer. In