Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/770

 750 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

not only does man thus begin life at the very bottom of the ladder, but he " crawls to maturity " at a slower pace by far than any of the animal species. Long before he reaches manhood most of the brute contemporaries and play- mates of his infant years will have had their day and declined into decrepi- tude or died of old age.

And, again, every student of anthropology knows that the period of immaturity or plasticity has been continually length- ening even in the human species. The individual attains man- hood at an earlier age among primitive than among highly developed peoples. An Indian child of ten is better able to care for himself than a white child of that age, who has been reared under the protection and in the seclusion of the schools, and who has thus been spared the necessity of taking his own part in the struggle for existence. Says Chamberlain :

Among the Athka Aleuts the boy is an independent hunter at ten and may marry ; the boy of the Bismarck Archipelago, who goes out with his father very early, knows as much as he does by his tenth or twelfth year ; in Tahiti the ease with which food can be obtained allows children to become practically free from paternal control, and by their eighth year to set up a sort of group-life by themselves ; among the Khevsurs of the Caucasus chil- dren early begin to fight, and "by their eighth or tenth year may and do speak their word in public ;" and many more examples from all over the world might be cited.

But if one will compare a child of civilization and a child of savagery at fifteen, again at twenty, and still again at thirty, he will appreciate that the relative immaturity, and helplessness perhaps, in the younger years of the child of civilization is essential for his later superiority.

Any community where most of the children are required to provide for themselves at a tender age cannot expect to progress rapidly or to attain a high position in the scale of civilization, for the reason that the new generations are not plastic and edu- cable long enough to adapt themselves to an increasingly com- plex social environment ; they could not assimilate elaborate achievements of their predecessors, even if these were made. If the race of Indians now on the boards could in a day develop a degree of culture equal to our own, but if their young con- tinued to ripen as early as they now do, the accomplishments of