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 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 173

in the objectivity of the judgment than any other form of deci- sion, for even before the civic court the action of the appellant only proceeds from confidence in the justness of the decision (since he regards that decision as just which is favorable to him- self) ; the respondent must take part in the process, whether he believes in the nonpartisanship of the judge or not. Arbitration, however, occurs, as was said, only through this belief on both sides. In principle mediation is differentiated from arbitration very sharply by the difference thus pointed out, and the more official the conciliatory action is, the more tenaciously will this differentiation be kept in mind, from the conflicts between capi- talists and laborers mentioned above, to those of high politics, in which .the "friendly offices" of a government, for the adjustment of a conflict between two others, are something quite different from the function of arbitrator which the ruler of a third land is sometimes invited to undertake. In the everyday affairs of pri- vate life, where the typical group of three constantly forces the one into the evident or latent, complete or partial, difference between the other two, very many intermediate grades are pro- duced. In the endless multiplicity of possible relationships the appeal of the parties to the third, and his voluntary or even for- cibly undertaken efforts for unity will give him a status in which the mediatorial and the arbitrative element cannot always be separated. As preparation for understanding of the actual struc- ture of human societies, and of their indescribable fulness and mobility, it is highly important to sharpen the vision for such additions and transitions, for the merely suggested and again disappearing forms of relationships, for their embryonic and fragmentary realizations. The examples in which, in each case, one of the concepts constructed for these forms of relationship is distinctly represented, are, to be sure, indispensable technical devices of sociology; but they have very much the same relation to the actual life of society which the approximately exact spa- tial forms with which we exemplify geometrical theorems have to the immeasurable complexity of the real forms of matter.

On the whole, in accordance with all the foregoing, the exist- ence of the nonpartisan serves to promote the stability of the