Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/817

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 787

rectly broke up the guild rtgime, brought in the factory system, created industrial cities, and riveted slavery upon our southern states. But innovations that do not make so irresistible an appeal juristic and political ideas, religious, ethical, and aesthetic ideals are apt to be neglected till some influence brings the public mind into a receptive attitude toward them. In such cases the influence is the cause.

There have always been men who suggested that horse-thieves deserve hanging. If, now, certain new communities do hang their horse-thieves, the cause of the practice is not the proponent, but the peculiar situation which disposes the community to fall in with his suggestion. For ages eloquent men have fulminated against strong drink. The modern temperance movement is, then, not to be credited solely to orators like Matthew and Gough. The responsiveness of the age to their appeals must be attributed to the great changes in diet and in industry which have made the liquor habit more pernicious than formerly. Take the crav- ing for divorce. Is it due to the example or advocacy of cer- tain influential persons ? Rather must we lay it to the opening of feminine careers and the relaxation of old beliefs which con- strained woman to bear unmurmuringly her yoke. Comte hinges a rise in the status of the slave or the woman on a change in speculative opinion. Now, however, we are apt to connect it with a change in the relation of population to land or in the indus- trial importance of woman. Similarly, the transformations of law and government are coming to be correlated less with the ideas and personalities that are active in achieving them than with certain hidden shiftings of economic or social power. So there are rival explanations, the one individual, the other col- lective, of the anti-slavery movement, the peace movement, the reform of punishment, the rise of socialism.

The fact is, the promulgation of a new idea or ideal is like casting a bit of ferment into a plasm. The psychologists are more intent on the ferment than on the nature of the medium in which it works. The economists, on the other hand, inquire why the medium permits fermentation to arise, but ignore the necessity of casting in the ferment. Both, however, are necessary, the