CHAP. I A Mixed tion Disin tegrates the Social Mind In a society governed from outside or above-Egypt, for example the introduction of strangers, provided they are lawabiding and industrious, may do no harm. But a democratic society, in which government, laws, and moral standards are the outcome of common understanding suffers as it becomes more heterogeneous in composition. The unworthy are able to slip into power because groups of worthy citizens are pulling different ways. When a people is so like-minded politically that fundamentals are taken for granted, it is ready to tackle new questions as they come up. But if it admits to citizenship myriads of strangers who insist on threshing over again old straw the relation of church to state, of church to school, of state to parent, of law to the liquor trade- ripe sheaves ready to yield the wheat of wisdom under the flails of discussion lie untouched. Pressing questions - public hygiene, conservation, the control of monopoly, the protection of labor-go to the foot of the docket and public interests are not looked after. American High MARITAL CONDITION Contrary to the prevalent impression, the Americans are one of ality very the most married peoples on the face of the earth. A greater proportion of them are, or have been, married than of the British, French, Belgians, Scandinavians, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Italians, Greeks or Japanese. Their only superiors in Europe are the Magyars and the Slavs. This high marriedness reflects, no doubt, rural life, relative ease of economic conditions among the common people, and a social position of woman which prompts her to scorn the irregular relations which a certain male element prefers. Moreover, servants are much hampered in marrying and in the United States the proportion of servants is singularly small. The usual American proportion of illegitimate births is from 3 to 4 per cent. When the rate exceeds this, it is usually owing to the negroes, many of whom have the most primitive ideas as to sex obligation. When one considers that in the European peoples the proportion born out of wedlock runs from 5 to 15 per cent., while in the South American countries the proportion of illegitimate births ranges from 20 per cent. to more than 50 per cent., the fact that, out of a hundred American white children, ninety six or ninety-seven have been born in marriage indicates a fair CHAP. I degree of success in social control of the sex relation. Not only are Americans much married but their fondness for the conjugal state seems to be increasing. From 1890 (when first the needful data were gathered) to 1910 the proportion of men 20 to 24 years of age who had married increased a fourth. The proportion of women in this age-class who had taken a husband advanced from 47 per cent. to 50 per cent. Out of a hundred American women in 1890 32 were single; in 1900, 31; in 1910, 30. Married Earlier in 1910 than in 1890 Nor is this tendency due to the influx of early-marrying East Americans Europeans. Take the girls of American parentage. In 1890 just about half of them were married; in 1910 nearly 52 per cent. of them had stood before the altar. After all we hear about "bachelor maids," the higher cost of the married state, and the postponement of marriage, it comes as a shock to discover that marriages are earlier than formerly and that all that has happened is that one or two women who twenty years ago would have become wives now never marry at all. The fact that one man in ten and four women in ten marry Marry before the age of 21 and that two-thirds of the women marry under 25 while only two-fifths of the men marry under 25, reflects the very unequal economic incidence of the matrimonial yoke. Since it is the husband who undertakes the legal obligation of support, matrimony generally occurs two or three years later for men than for women. Greater difficulty in getting a start in life results in a later average age of marriage for men, but does not affect the age of brides. NORMALITY On Why Men Later than Women Vitality flect the Ability tion of the Composi The ability differences within a population are of immense Society's social importance. The super-normal provide society with lead- and Sucers, misleaders, inspirers, path-finders and directors. Under fair competition the conspicuously successful will be of this type. the other hand, the sub-normal are largely responsible for such sinister phenomena as crime, pauperism, vagrancy and prostitution. There is reason to believe that a third of the prostitutes in America are feeble-minded. It is supposed that from a quarter to a third of the paupers are hereditarily defective. Half or more of chronic inebriates are victims of a bad heredity. The People СНАР. І Proportion of Congen. in the United proportion of criminals who are mentally defective is no doubt many times larger than that in the population at large. The number of feeble-minded in the United States is not reckital Defect oned at less than 375,000, while a much greater host carry the taint in their germ plasm and, if they mate with their own type, may transmit it to their descendants. The insane and demented are estimated to number at least 350,000. Epileptics are figured by some at 150,000. Counting in all the well-marked types of congenital defect perhaps one person in a hundred is so poor in natural equipment as to present a problem. Much Depends on opment of a Technique of Mental Measurement The measurement of mental differences is yet in its infancy. the Devel. Its technique is, however, rapidly developing and before long we may be able to ascertain with a fair degree of accuracy the natural mental capacity of any individual. When that time comes it may be possible to gauge the comparative brain power of races and of hybrids, to discriminate at immigration stations between the desirables and the undesirables, to discover what youth are worthy of being aided to a higher education, to find for each profession the grade of capacity requisite for success in it, or to sort out of a body of employees the ones available for responsibility and direction. Society will then be able to locate its stock of superior ability, to discover whether much of it is running to waste, to see whether it is reproducing itself, to find when and why a community becomes impoverished in respect to ability, and to trace the routes and causes of the migrations of the capable. CHAPTER II CITY AND COUNTRY At the birth of the American nation one hundred and thirty CHAPT banization American years ago, its largest city had but forty-two thousand inhab- Swift Uritants, while only one person in thirty lived in the six towns of of the more than eight thousand population each. Now there cannot Population be fewer than eight hundred such places in which dwell at least two-fifths of all Americans. Nearly one-half of us live in places of over 2,500 inhabitants, a tenth in villages, and hardly more than two-fifths in the open country. So many of the coming genera POPULATION IN PLACES OF 8,000 INHABITANTS OR MORE AT EACH CENSUS: 1790-1910. tion are growing up in cities that it will not be long ere the national soul is urban. The End ing of the Frontier Acceler Up to thirty years ago there was an agricultural frontier which acted as a brake on the forces of urbanization. The overflow from the long-settled regions split into two streams, one flowing ates the to the rising cities, while the other spread out upon free land. The opportunity to create farm homes in the public domain saved hundreds of thousands every decade from the reaching tentacles Process CHAP. II of our great cities. Now that settlement is completed the ambitious farm youth without large capital has only the option of becoming a tenant farmer or going to the city. The City ward Drift a World Phenome non It Is sion of From 1850 to The indraught to the cities is not peculiar to the United States. "London is probably two thousand years old, and yet four-fifths of its growth was added during the past century. 1890 Berlin grew more rapidly than New York. Paris is now five times as large as it was in 1800. Rome has increased 50 per cent. since 1890. St. Petersburg has increased fivefold in a hundred years. Odessa is a thousand years old, but nineteen-twentieths of its population were added during the nineteenth century. Bombay grew from 150,000 to 821,000 from 1800 to 1890. Tokio increased nearly 800,000 during the last twenty years of the century; while Osaka was nearly four times as large in 1903 as in 1872, and Cairo has more than doubled since 1850. Thus in Europe, Asia and Africa we find that a redistribution of population is taking place. The movement from country to city is a world phenomenon." 1 Despite the denunciations of cities by philosophers and the idealizations of the country by the poets, the cityward flow continues because its causes are fundamental. CAUSES OF URBAN GROWTH I. The application of mechanical power to transportation has the Expan- so cheapened carriage that interchanges of goods have waxed like Jonah's gourd. Ever greater is the proportion of our consumables brought to us from beyond the hundred-mile zone, from beyond the thousand-mile zone, from overseas, from the ends of the earth. Gulf Streams of traffic pour between regions, countries and climates. Wherever there is a break in transportation, i.e., wherever cargoes shift between wagon and rail, land and water, canal and river, river and sea, and wherever traffic brooks gather into a river or a traffic river is split among canals, there a city springs up. These swelling streams of commerce permit an ever larger contingent to make a living from handling, storing, exchanging and forwarding a mass of goods which grows faster than the population, faster than the total product, and which must make an ever-longer journey in order to reach the consumer. 2. Two generations ago the typical farm family produced for 1 Josiah Strong, "The Challenge of the City," p. 18. |