Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/541

Rh wear clothes, partly by social intolerance for human nudity in public, and partly because of the facilities for obtaining clothes, with all which that implies; there will now be no game to pursue and no need to pursue it, since the man's food supplies will come from the agents of the industrial system; he will soon lose his primitive, many-sided industrial capacity, for he will have an army of stock-raisers, farmers, tailors, shoemakers, house-builders, and doctors at his service; while in time society will impose, in place of the powers which it abstracts, new functions and activities, assimilating him industrially to the units of which it is already composed. In both these cases, moreover, likeness will be enforced by the resistance offered to unlikeness, and not by any inherent superiority of one system or any inherent inferiority of another; for savages who have not yet learned to cooperate are as much held to their rude industrial methods by the stresses that impel to likeness as civilized men are held by such stresses to the vastly more complex and highly organized activities of the modern society.

The same is true of nonindustrial forms of social organization. As a community imposes its industrial methods upon its own and upon intruding members, whether it represent a high or a low stage of human society, so does a community, quite irrespective of the degree of its development, insist upon a certain likeness of habits and customs in the units of which it is composed. A civilized man forced to live among savages will find it impossible to avoid barbarous methods of living, just as a savage compelled to sojourn in a civilized community will inevitably adopt the manners of the race among whom his lot is cast. In all communities whatsoever, and under ordinary circumstances valid for the majority of men, it is vastly easier to imitate others in general characters than to differ from them in those characters, while the difficulty of differing becomes almost insuperable when the stresses tending to assimilate the individual to the sum of individuals are exerted directly by the group or community as a whole. All acts of race assimilation in history—many of them already accomplished, some of them still going on—all so-called civilizing processes, whether carried out by individuals or by peoples, and all proselytizing movements, by whomsoever conducted, are but so many illustrations of the general process. Such modifications, moreover, as have been wrought in the native races of India, and in the negro of the United States, by dominant populations in those countries, are going on within each nation, each city, and every social group, however large or small its dimensions may be. For if the traveler, when living in strange countries, finds it expedient, if only temporarily, to conform to the customs of the people he meets—such customs being imposed upon him by the