Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/517

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 499

advantage, but by means of the utility to B ; then to private advantage by means of B without any advantage to him, but also without inflicting upon him any injury; and ends at last in ego- istic action at the expense of B. Since this now is reciprocated from the side of B, but scarcely ever in precisely the same manner and in equal measure, there result the countless mixtures of convergence and divergence in human relationships.

To be sure, there are struggles which appear to exclude every other element, e. g., between the robber or the thug and his victim. When a struggle of this sort goes to the extreme of annihilation, it is surely the marginal case in which the share of the unifying element has become a nullity; in which, however the concept of reciprocal action really no longer finds any appli- cation, because this extreme case really assumes the non- existence of the other party to a reaction. So soon, on the other hand, as any sort of consideration, any limitation of vio- lence, is present, there comes into play by virtue of that fact a socializing factor, if it is only in the form of a restraint. Kant declares that every war in which the parties do not lay upon themselves any reservations in the use of possible means must, on psychological grounds, become a war of extermination ; since when men do not at least restrain themselves from assassination, from treachery, from instigation of treason, they thereby destroy that confidence in the mental processes of the enemy which is the one necessary condition to make possible a. conclusion of peace.

Almost unavoidably an element of community weaves itself into the hostility where the stage of open violence has given place to some other relation, which perhaps shows a completely undi- minished aggregate of enmity between the parties. When the Lombards in the sixth century had conquered northern Italy, they imposed upon the conquered a tribute of one-third the product of the soil. They did it in such a manner that each individual among the conquerors had assigned to him the tribute of defined individuals in the population. In the case of the type thus dis- tinguished it is possible that the hatred of the conquered toward their oppressors may grow to such a degree that it may even be