Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/25

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 13

aim would be impossible. The erection of the latter is usually the task then of the smaller circles, and of the energy of indi- viduals who separate from each other in countless private undertakings, while these individuals united in a mass have worked in sweeping and destructive fashion. The same trend appears in the results of wide appeals to popular suffrage, which are so often, and almost incomprehensively, negative. For example, in Switzerland in the year 1900 a law with reference to sickness and accident insurance within the federation was summarily rejected by the referendum, after it had been unani- mously adopted by both representative bodies, the Nationalrat and the Standerat. The same has usually been the fate of most measures subject to the referendum. Rejection is the simplest action, and consequently great masses can combine in it. The positive standpoints of the separate groups from which this law was rejected were extremely various ; they were particularistic and ultramontane, agrarian and capitalistic, technical and par- tisan ; and consequently nothing could be common to them but negation. On that account, to be sure, in case many small circles agree at least in negative provisions, this may, on the contrary, indicate or prepare their unity. It has been observed that, while the Greeks exhibited wide culture-differences among themselves, yet even when we compare the Arcadian and the Athenian with the contemporary Carthaginians or Egyptians, Persians or Thracians, they still had many sorts of negative characteristics in common. Nowhere in historic Greece were there human sacrifices, or intentional mutilations ; nowhere polygamy, or the sale of children into slavery ; nowhere unlimited subjec- tion to a single person. With all the positive differences, this common possession of the merely negative must necessarily have made the persons contained in such a community conscious that they belonged together, in a culture area extending beyond the boundaries of the single state.

The negative character of the bond which unites the great area into a unit appears primarily in its norms. This is prepared for by the phenomenon that, other things being equal, combin- ing determinations of every sort must be the more simple and