Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/823

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 793

harsher, but, as the history of the southern colonies amply proves, an increase in the proportion of slave population has the same effect. Now, a people so conservative as to surround itself with a Chinese wall, banish its innovators, stone its prophets, make the ancient writings the staple of its instruction, and draw its leaders from the ranks of its literati, may effectually seal the sources of qualitative change. Yet it cannot by any contrivance elude quantitative changes which may react upon and modify its institutions.

Most of the "functions" of society have no tendency to dis- turb the status quo. The round of love, marriage, and reproduc- tion, so long as births and deaths balance; production, so far as it is balanced by consumption ; exchange, so long as the argosies of commerce carry goods, but not ideas; education, so far as it passes on the traditional culture these, together with recrea- tion, social intercourse, worship, social control, government, and the administration of justice, are essentially statical. They might conceivably go on forever without producing change.

This is, in fact, what we should expect ; for human activities are instigated by desire, and the result they aim at is a transitory one, viz., the satisfaction of desire. Anything that whets desire multiplies activities, but does not necessarily change their form. Like the rotating wheel, the striving millions exhibit motion without movement. In view of the fact that the hard-working peoples are the most conservative, society might be likened to a gyro- scope, in that the greater its motion, the greater is its resistance to change of position. If, then, these recurrent activities have any dynamic operation, it will be an incidental or side effect.

Now, there are certain regular processes which leave behind them as by-product a permanent effect, and in time these effects must accumulate until they strain and warp social structures. Hunting, by selective elimination of the less cautious creatures, eventually makes the game scarcer and shyer, and so renders the chase a more precarious mode of livelihood. In the pastoral stage the continual escape of wilder animals from the herd, and the consequent breeding from the more tractable tends to com- plete domestication, and so paves the way to agriculture.