Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/825

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 795

later Roman society was brought about by the prolonged opera- tion of an iniquitous tax system which ground them slowly to powder. In the Dark Ages the short-sighted practice of reward- ing military services with estates, which, at first granted for life, later became inheritable, eventually dissipated the resources of the crown and led to the decentralization seen in the feudal sys- tem. In the course of centuries the death-bed gifts of the rich to religious corporations accumulated a fifth of the soil of Europe in the "dead hand," and thus profoundly modified the position of the church. The oppressive exercise of jurisdiction by the great proprietors of mediaeval Germany pressed down the peasants one after another into a servile condition, until at last free cultivators ceased to exist. The similar practice of southern justices of today in imposing on negroes excessive fines and binding them to work for the planter who pays the fine, will, if unchecked, gradually remand the colored race into slavery.

Even the progress of the arts and sciences, usually so prolific in social changes, is not always due to irruptions from the individual brain. The right form of a tool may come from an ingenious mind, or from trying every possible form and noting which one works best. The dressing of skins or the fashioning of pots may improve by the mere comparing of the results of different treatments. A fisher-folk may arrive at the correct lines for the boat by observing the behavior of craft variously shaped according to accident or individual caprice. The emer- gence of a standard pattern of bow, or pot, or snow-shoe, or hut is sometimes development rather than invention a precipitate from collective experience rather than the happy thought of some clever wight. Fin and flipper and leg and wing were built by the blind accumulation of fortuitous variations, and it is likely that some of man's achievements have come by the method of trial and error continued through generations.

Science, too, although supposed to rise by strokes of genius alone, has something of the inevitable in its ascent, owing to the accumulation of facts recorded by generations of observers. The early priesthoods scanned the heavens till periods and orbits stared at them out of their own records. Think of the long col-