CHAPTER XLIV TRANSFORMATION COME changes in society happen; other changes are willed. Let us call the former process transformation; the latter, reshaping. Now, the factors which produce transformation may be distinguished as statico-dynamic processes, transmutations and stimuli, and we shall consider them in this order. THE ACCUMULATION OF RESULTS FROM STATICO-DYNAMIC PROCESSES СНАР. Statical Processes Most of the activities which occur in society have no tendency to disturb the status quo. Production, if it is offset by con- in Society sumption; reproduction, so long as births and deaths balance; exchange, in case the argosies of commerce carry goods but not ideas; education, provided it simply passes on the traditional culture these, together with recreation, social intercourse, worship, social control, government, and the administration of justice, are essentially statical. They might go on forever without producing change. Processes with Dy Products Other regular processes leave behind them unintended byproducts which in time accumulate and bring to pass social namie Bychanges. Hunting, by elimination of the less cautious creatures, eventually makes the game scarcer and shyer, so that the tribe may have to look for another food-basis. In the pastoral stage the continual escape of the wilder creatures from the herd and the resultant breeding from the more tractable completes domestication and so paves the way to the adoption of agriculture. Disturbing, also, are operations which modify the physical environment, such as deforestation, the building of dykes, canals, drains, causeways, and roads. Mining, clearing, reclaiming, enclosing, as well as the extermination of pests, have a dynamic effect seeing that they lessen the material they have to work upon. The digging of the precious metals transforms society by making them in time so plentiful that the "money economy sedes the "natural economy." СНАР. Accumula Products History abounds in striking instances of large changes brought about by cumulative processes, i.e., those which left a little more tion of By or less of something. The destruction of the middle class, the curiales, in later Roman society came about by the operation through centuries of a tax system which ground them slowly to powder. In the Dark Ages the short-sighted practice of rewarding military services with estates, which, at first granted for life, later became inheritable, eventually dissipated the resources of the Crown and led to feudal decentralization.1 In the course of centuries the death-bed gifts to religious corporations caused a fifth of the soil of Europe to be accumulated in the "dead hand" and made the Church a huge endowed institution. The oppressive exercise of their justice-of-the-peace powers by the great proprietors of medieval 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 a few years ago in imposing on negroes arrested on petty charges excessive fines, and binding them to work at a paltry wage for the planter who paid the fine, would in time have subjected the bulk of the Southern negroes to forced labor had not the Federal courts intervened. Unintended Metamorphoses How One Thing Turns into Another TRANSMUTATIONS Transmutations are changes of an involuntary character due to the difficulty one generation has in accurately reproducing the copy set by its predecessor. The speech of our ancestors underwent the unnoticed sound-shiftings recorded in Grimm's law. Refracted through generations of scribes, pictographs shrivel into conventional ideographic characters. Natural gestures became fossilized into meaningless forms. Coins minted first as tiny spades or knives drift into unrecognizable shapes. Human institutions and relations likewise glide insensibly into forms which would not be assumed of intention. Presents freely given a chief pass into presents expected, even demanded, while volunteered help passes into exacted service. Among the Greeks there was "a gradual transition from the primitive idea of a personal goddess, Themis, attached to Zeus, first to his sentences or orders called Themistes, and next, by a still farther 1 Kowalevsky, "Oekonomische Entwickelung Europa's," Vol. II, chs I and 2. remove, to various established customs which these sentences were believed to sanctify." Bank-notes, issued as certificates of deposit of coin and redeemable on demand, come at last to be looked upon as real money, and circulate long after the tradition. of the old right of redemption has been lost, and the original deposit dissipated. Often it is by an imperceptible process that lordship ripens into property. In India minor officers, courtiers, and servants" were provided for by being allowed to take, in individual villages, the whole or part of the Raja's grain." "In time these claims develop into a landlord right over the village." "The change from revenue-manager to landlord was accomplished in about a century." The flaith, an elected public officer of the early Celtic clan, became a noble by the hereditary principle encroaching upon and choking the elective principle, while the clan land which endowed the flaith's office, from having been held by several succeeding generations of the same family, came to be looked upon as private property not only by the faith, but by the people themselves. An ethical religion tends to become external and perfunctory, owing to the fact that its spirit is more quickly altered in transmission from father to son than its form. The most sacred commands and the most authoritative ideals will be unwittingly deformed if they run counter to human inclination and have not been fixed in writing. CHAP. XLIV Evolution Arrested The word evolution is applied to a series of changes brought Social about by the operation of resident forces. Social changes brought Cannot Be about by statico-dynamic processes and transmutations may therefore properly be termed social evolution. These are what sociologists have in mind when they insist that society evolves, in fact cannot be prevented from evolving. A society may be so pleased with its institutions that it suffers no willed changelike the Greek city-state which decreed death to any citizen who should propose to alter its constitution - but it cannot arrest social evolution. Hence, it had better leave the door open to changes which adapt institutions to the new situations which social evolution has brought. Are Not Now, there are other unwilled social changes the cause of stimuli which is to be sought not in society but under or outside so within ciety. The growth of population, the production of the man of * See Baden-Powell, "The Land Systems of British India," Vol. I, pp. 131, 186; Vol. II, p. 224. СНАР. XLIV The Pressure of Numbers inventive genius, do not occur in the societal cycle but in the biotic cycle under it. The accumulation of wealth happens in the economic process which underlies men's social relations. The interaction of societies and the cross-fertilization of cultures illustrate how society may be pulled out of its orbit by outside forces. We may call these factors of social change stimuli and their result social growth. THE GROWTH OF POPULATION Increase of numbers changes adversely the relation of population to land, making it harder to gain a livelihood. This stress then incites to new ways of exploiting the physical environment. The advance from the hunting stage to the pastoral did not follow promptly the domestication of animals, for man seems to have first tamed animals for amusement rather than for food. It awaited the pressure of numbers. It was food-shortage which made man pass over from herdmanship to tillage. Of the Navajos we read: read: "Indian corn ... was known to them apparently from the earliest times, but while they remained a mere hunting tribe, they detested Next Eco- the labor of planting. But as their numbers increased, the Pushes Society into the nomic Stage Advance to the Next Economic Stage Trans forms Society game, more regularly hunted, became scarce, and to maintain themselves in food, necessity forced them to a more general cultivation of corn, and the regular practice of planting became established among them." We have like testimony, as to the cause of going over to agriculture, respecting the Bashkirs, the Kirghises and various other peoples. Alluding to the passing over from pasturage to agriculture in seventh-century Ireland, an ancient chronicle remarks: "Because of the abundance of the households, in their period, therefore it is that they (the sons of Æd Slane) introduced boundaries into Ireland." There is evidence that the earliest cultivators of the soil were strangers attached to the tribe upon whom the rough work of the community fell, and who would be the first to suffer from a scarcity of food." By causing these economic shifts the growth of population brings on changes in social organization. The adoption of pastoral pursuits converts the savage horde into the tribe, institutes property, establishes male kinship, develops patriarchal authority. favors polygamy and wife-purchase, makes woman a chattel, causes captives to be enslaved instead of eaten, and substitutes the wergeld for the blood-feud. The adoption of agriculture even changes the nature of the social bonds. Says Maine: "From the moment a tribal community settles down finally upon a definite space of land, the land begins to be the basis of society in place of kinship." Agriculture breaks up the tribe into clans which become village-communities; while the backbreaking toil induces a resort to slavery and to the slave trade. Increase of population does not cease to be a dynamic factor with the adoption of agriculture. The land is progressively occupied until at last the poor man has no longer a direct access to nature, but must offer his services for wages. When this point is reached slavery and serfdom disappear of themselves, for it is no longer necessary to own laborers in order to have them in sufficient supply. The expansion of population compels a resort to inferior soils. This, by enhancing the value of the better tracts and increasing the landowner's share of the produce, gives rise to an agricultural aristocracy, which, as it withdraws itself from labor and occupies itself with war and politics, becomes the dominant social class. CHAP. XLIV ment of Remoulds the Econ omy of Society The enlargement of demand in consequence of the growth Enlargeof numbers often causes an exchange economy to take the Demand place of domestic husbandry. In some districts the natural resources fall short in certain respects and the local population desire to supply their lack of particular commodities from the larger resources of other districts, sending out in return those products of their own which are to be had in the greatest abundance. This potential exchange makes it worth while to create arteries of communication which, in turn, promote the territorial division of labor. Besides thus calling into being merchants, markets, and movements of goods, increase of numbers causes local groups of craftsmen to spring up producing articles formerly demanded in quantities too small to set up currents of trade. In place of periodical fairs appear now town populations regularly exchanging their wares with the country. The need of better security for goods on routes traversing many local jurisdictions creates a demand for royal protection and cements that alliance of burghers with king which is so potent in humbling the feudal lords. In his struggle with the barons the king chooses from the burghers of the town his |