Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/611

Rh houses alike, and in them are usually treated to music of a not absolutely inferior quality. To say that good coffee is to be had at the native coffeehouses is stating a truism, and a condition which probably few will venture to deny. Coffee is the soul of the land, and its history a part of the history of the people themselves.



HE extreme fluidity of our heterogeneous population is impressed upon us by every phenomenon of social life here in America. We imagine the people of Europe, on the other hand, after scores of generations of stable habitation, to have settled themselves permanently and contentedly into place. This is an entirely erroneous assumption. As a matter of fact, they are almost as mobile as our own American types. There are two ways in which demographic crystallization may have taken place. A people may have become rigid horizontally, divided into castes, or social strata; or it may be geographically segregated into localized communities, varying in size all the way from the isolated hamlet to the highly individualized nation. Both of these forms of crystallization are breaking down to-day under the pressure of modern industrialism and democracy, in Europe as well as in America. Nor is it true that the recency of our American social life has made the phenomena of change more marked here than abroad. In fact, with the relics of the old régime on every hand, the present tendencies in Europe are the more startling of the two by reason of the immediate contrast. Demographic processes are at work which promise mighty results for the future. These are not cataclysmic, like the French Revolution; but being well-nigh universal, the fact that they are slow-moving should not blind us to their ultimate effects. Such movements threaten to break up, not only the horizontal social stratification, but the vertical geographical cleavage of locality and nationality as well. Obviously any disturbance of these at once involves destruction of the racial individuality of the continent at the same time. For this reason, many phases of social analysis appertain