CHAP. Why Man group which could regularly find sufficient food without dispersing. So long as he depended only on such food as Nature. provided, man would rarely be able to live in groups including a hundred individuals. An enduring cluster of half a thousand members could hardly appear until considerable progress had been made in developing an artificial basis of food supply. During the immense period in which the species lingered in this embryonic social state occurred its dispersal over the habitable globe and the subsequent development of racial differences in the stocks long subject to diverse geographic conditions. DIFFUSION Multiplying like any other animal, primitive man tended to expand up to the limits of his opportunities for gaining a living. As the horde grew, hunger would oblige it to break into two or more hordes, which would scatter in quest of food. In time such areas as were fitted to become the home of the species would be filled with small simple human groups. But, thanks to his gradual gain in brain power - which is very clearly recorded in the skulls of the successive races of the Stone Age - man was not confined, as were his pre-human ancestors, to warm and bountiful regions. He had the ingenuity to provide himself clothing and shelter and to devise ways of destroying enemy species and increasing his food supply. Thereby, in the words of Ward, "he was able to break over the faunal boundaries that limit the distribution of other species and to overflow into other regions to which he was not originally adapted. All other species are restricted to special districts and unable to quit them. Every attempt to do so proves fatal to the individuals that make it." "Any species that could successfully overstep its faunal barriers would, according to the now well-understood laws of multiplication, soon overspread the globe." "Man alone acquired this power and this was the result of his superior resourcefulness, due in turn to his inventive faculty." "Thus emancipated from the slavery of the environment this favored species commenced that career of universal expansion which ultimately encompassed the entire globe. Although his memory was sufficient to establish the kinship group, this faculty was not sufficient to maintain a connection between the daughterhordes and the ancestral hordes from which they had descended and a few removes were sufficient to obliterate all traces of CHAP. relationship." VIII and Differ "Those groups that had wandered farthest from the original Dispersion center of dispersion were utter strangers to the mother group. entiation As they moved out along special and extremely irregular lines, there were soon produced many such terminal groups and these were usually remote from each other, often separated by seas or mountain chains." "The period during which this process was going on, however ng it may have been, may be called the period of social differentiation. In it languages were formed, but, owing to gradual isolation, each group acquired a language of its own. At least the variation that would naturally take place in the language of any group would soon render it practically a different language frm that of any of the remoter groups from which it had descended "2 "A fortiori would the languages of all the terminal groups be dferent from one another. It would be the same with customs. The differences of environment would alone accomplish this, but customs naturally tend to vary, and unless there be intercommunication, they rapidly differentiate. The customs as well as the languages of all the different radiating lines would be utterly trlike except in certain fundamentals. When customs and cere nials at length took the form of cults and religions, these, too, were different, and all the scattered groups ultimately presented e utmost heterogeneity in all their social characteristics. Between them the only points of agreement were biological. They 1 all belonged to the same genus and the same species, and were all equally men." Ward here exaggerates a little the heterogeneity of non-communicating groups. Their identity of nature causes such groups move upward along parallel paths, so that at corresponding ges in their development they have some capacity to under A striking illustration of the low state of these people (natives of Cee's till quite recently is to be found in the great diversity of their ares. Villages three or four miles apart have separate dialects and n grup of three or four such villages has a distinct language unintel e to all the rest; so that, till the recent introduction of Malay by femissioranes, there must have been a bar to all free communication.” e. The Malay Archipelago," Vol. I. p. 411. *The above quotations are from “Social Differentiation and Social Integrat, n,” Am. Journal of Sociology, Vol. VIII, p. 721. ism of De Parallelvelopment Communi in Non Groups CHAP. Arabia as an Area of Uniform Characterization stand and get along with one another. It is well to remember with Thomas: Parallelism of Social De "Human nature, the external world and the fundamental needs of life are everywhere much alike and . . . there is, roughly velopment speaking, a parallelism of development in all groups, or a tend ency in every group which advances at all, to take the same steps as those taken by other groups. Such phenomena as spirit belief and accompanying ecclesiastical institutions, a maternal system preceding patriarchal control, ecclesiastical and political despotism preceding democracy, and artistic, inventive, and mythical products of the same general ground pattern show a general law of uniformity in progress. "The fact of a common possession of language, myth, religion, number, time and space conceptions, political and legal organization, under conditions where the possibility of borrowing is precluded, indicates that the same general type of mind is a possession of all races both high and low." The first discernible process that looks to the merging of men into a larger society is preliminary or extra-social assimilation. ASSIMILATION BY THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT How groups subject to the same geographic influences are made ready to enter into social relations when circumstances are favorable, may be illustrated from Southwestern Asia. Here is an immense expanse where mountain ranges, the chief separators of peoples, are wanting. Says Hogarth: "A certain degree of similarity in human character and an even greater similarity in language prevails over an immense area where races of most various origin have all been assimilated more or less by the one which occupies the healthy crown of the land, the Arabian of Nejd. "Differences there are many and obvious among this widespread people, differences due to the local circumstances of their habitation, whether steppe or desert, whether in the neighborhood of an oasis or in an oasis itself; differences due to the elevation of one district compared with another, to latitude, or to exposure to particular climatic influences; differences due to the proximity or distance of a non-Arabised section of the mountainous fringe, or to communications with the civilization of • American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, p. 450. Persia or India or Egypt or Europe; and finally differences of less moment due to race. But through all persists the uniformity of that desert life which is the same to-day as when the Beni Israel were wandering in a corner of this wilderness." " "Bedouins may be, and are, of many racial families, but the uniformity of physical conditions over all this area and the absence of the strongest natural influences of separation, cause their life to be organized on such similar lines that they have all come to take something of a common national character. from the most vigorous, because best circumstanced, of their kind: Hamite in the Southwest, Mongol in the North, Iranian in the Southeast, all have been Arabised by the Semites of the center. Of all the fertile tracts of the Fringe, only the mountain system of the Mediterranean littoral . . . has been able altogether to withstand Arabisation, and that in virtue of its abrupt relief, its high fertility and its intimate connection with East Europe and Anatolia." The significance of common environment appears when we realize that the clans which fused into the people of Israel probably had no common ancestor but were prepared by the shaping influence of their desert life and by the diffusion of certain culture elements among them all to act together when the time came. Jehovah was originally not the god of the clans but the god of the Kenites. Moses bound all the tribes to Jehovah's service. Identity of environment later made possible among the Arab tribes the diffusion of Mahomet's religion, which in turn paved the way for the unification under the caliphs of Bagdad and the formation and spread of a truly Arab civilization. Other important areas of uniform characterization are the interior of Australia, the South African plateau, the Central African jungle, the basin of the Amazon, the Andean highlands of South America, the steppes of Western Asia and the great Russian plain. ASSIMILATION BY OCCUPATION AND MODE of Life A certain mode of life was forced upon the Indian tribes of the prairies which subsisted by the chase of the buffalo. The **A Wandering Scholar in the Levant," p. 255. • Ibid., p. 256. CHAP. Probably mon An the Com cestor of the Twelve Tribes of -the Desert CHAP. A Common Eskimos of the Arctic tundra are brought into one plane of practice by the dictate of their common geographical environment. The Asiatic nomads are so deeply stamped by the steppe which ment May they wander over that from time to time leaders have arisen among them who have united them in attacking the adjacent settled peoples. Such leaders were Attila, Ghenghis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Tamerlane. Force Groups into One Plane of Practice Discord Between Religion as a Social Bond Those subject to the same geographic environment may find union impossible because they are at different economic stages.. Rarely can hunters combine with herdmen or herdmen with agriculturists. Their manners of life and economic interests no more blend than oil and water. The endless strife between Bedouins and sedentary Arabs, between prairie Indians and forest Indians, between Scottish Highlanders and Lowlanders is proverbial. The cattle-raising Hottentots of South Africa are never on good terms with their neighbors, the hunting Bushmen, altho they are one in blood and land. Compare the friendliness of the American Indian toward the trapper with his hostility toward the settler, whose manner of life he did not understand or believe in. In civilized life there is latent feud between country dwellers and city dwellers. It has been shown, for example, that in the vote on the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, the townsmen were for it and the farmers against it. ASSIMILATION BY COMMON ELEMENTS OF CULTURE Mere identity of origin counts for little in preparing groups for unity. The question is, what have they in common? The sense of community whether of belief, of taste or of feeling and the feeling may be either affection or aversion toward persons or things-begets sympathy and draws men together. To the same class belong recognition of a common ancestry, the use of a common speech, the prizing of a common literature. Religion, "as it touches the deepest chords of man's nature, is capable of educing the maximum of harmony or discord. No force has been more efficient in knitting factions and states together, or in breaking them up and setting the parts of a state in fierce antagonism to one another. Religion held together the Eastern Empire, originally a congeries of diverse races. for 800 years. Religion now holds together the Turkish Empire. Religion split up the Romano-Germanic Empire after |