I have attempted to produce an instantaneous picture, fixing the facts on my negative as they appear at a given moment, and the imagination of my readers must add the movement, the constant changes, the whirl and turmoil of life."

After his seventeen years of work Mr. Booth depends not upon the cross-sectional view of social conditions, but upon the memory of his workers and the flow of the seventeen years, to give length to his survey. Mr. Kellogg says:

The modern industrial city is a flow, not a tank. The important thing is not the capacity of a town but the volume and currents of its life and by gauging these we can gauge the community. We must gauge at the intake -the children, the immigrant, the countrymen who come in; gauge at the outlets; and gauge at the stages in the course of the working life. If there be unnecessary death, if strong freed hands are crippled or diseased through their manner of living or working, if the twelve-hour man sees everything gray before his eyes in the morning, if women work in new ways that cost their strength or the strength of their young; if school children are drafted off as laborers before they are fit; if boys grow into manhood without training for the trades of this generation-then we have a problem in social hydraulics to deal with."

Of course, it is perfectly evident that if the surveys are significant they are certain to carry themselves forward, not as surveys perhaps, but in the form of undertakings that got their inspiration and their basis of fact out of the survey. In this sense they are functional. Might it not be possible for them to carry themselves forward in adequate systems of social accounting, whereby we should not need again to take the invoice, but a balance sheet?

Social surveys as purposeful.-It may be pertinently asked also whether the social survey dominated by a practical purpose can be completely scientific. Perhaps we should not put upon the survey the test of scientific validity. It may be that they are for immediate and practical purposes and reach their sufficient proportions when they amount to convincing arguments to persuade men to undertake the work of civic and social betterment. The question would still remain, however, whether the collection and interpretation of data can be done without prejudice when 'Booth, op. cit., I, 26. 'Kellogg, op. cit., 525.

there is an ever-present purpose, and when every item is to be tested by the touchstone of getting something done.

Allow me a word of summary and then I am through. I have tried (1) to indicate the approaches to the social survey, naming the charity organization movement, the scientific method, and the insistence of sociology; (2) to describe the London and the Pittsburgh surveys; (3) to raise some questions as to the limitations of the method of the surveys. I wish to add my heartiest approval of this latest form of organizing the available knowledge of general living and working conditions, and its necessary outcome, a program of industrial and social betterment, the measure of the power of which no one can yet take. To use the figure of the distinguished president of the American Political Science Association in his splendid address at the opening meeting of these kindred societies, the social survey issuing in action is the best illustration I can think of, of the scholar and the statesman coming together in united effort.

THE RIVALRY OF SOCIAL GROUPS

GEORGE E. VINCENT
The University of Chicago

The materials for the psychological interpretation of individual and social phenomena have been accumulating rapidly. A mere enumeration of terms and phrases brings up a panorama of theories: "Social growth," "social evolution," "the general mind," "co-operation," "coercion," "social control," "contact," "contract," "consciousness of kind," "the dialectic of personal growth," "the social self," "the looking-glass self," "the social nature of conscience," "the dialectic of social growth," "imitation, opposition, invention," "the individual in abstraction," "social consciousness," "the social mind," "the persistence of social groups," "the rôle of unconsciousness," "the cake of custom," "the folkways" and "the mores," "instinct and habit,' "psychic planes," "mob-mind," "like-mindedness,” “conflict and rivalry," "group struggle," "social selection," "survival value," "crisis," "adaptation," "the élite as the social brain," "making up the group mind," "the social process." To one who knows the field these ideas are familiar, many of them commonplace. At first they may seem fragmentary and detached; but they quickly arrange themselves into something like order and unity. They are seen to be parts, aspects of a general theory which has been growing increasingly illuminating.

The idea of the group as a means of interpretation is emerging more clearly. Society is too vague and abstract a concept. It is useful for symbolic purposes and for generalized description, but to have any vividness of meaning it must be translated into more concrete terms: nation, community, class, sect. Large social

'My obligations to all social psychologists are so obvious that I have not attempted to refer specific points to individual men. The ideas of Bagehot, James, Baldwin, Tarde, Brinton, Ross, Cooley, Sumner, Dewey, Tufts, Thomas, McDougall, Novicow, Gumplowicz, Bryce, Ellwood, et. al., will easily be recognized, as will the more general theories of Ward, Giddings, and Small.

unities fall apart under examination into a multiplicity of constituent groups. Each of these step by step disintegrates until only the person remains. But this individual may be further analyzed into subordinate selves, and even into thoughts and desires. These elements, however, are quite as abstract at this extreme as society at the other. The mind harks back toward some manageable idea which keeps attention fixed upon the facts of life in common. The group concept meets this need, for the group is at once a subdivision of society and the nidus of personality. Groups get their meaning from encompassing societies; the individual gets his meaning from his groups.

The idea of the group involves three fundamental things: first, there must be a common interest, whether this be a past experience, a present crisis, or a future purpose. A memorial association lays stress upon the past; a union on strike fixes its gaze upon a present problem; the "Boston in 1915" movement looks to the future. Yet these distinctions are only the shifting of emphasis. In the genuine, persistent group all three types of common interest are to be found. In the second place, each member of a group, at least in times of crisis, has a sense of the group as such; i.e., he is able to visualize or to represent to himself in some way the group as a unity, as something set off from, or over against, other groups. In the third place, the members of the group are aware of the common interest and know that this image of the group is shared by their fellows. It is this sense of team-work which goes by the name of group consciousness.

There are many ways in which groups may be classified. Degree of complexity is a criterion by which groups may be said to be primary like the family or compound like the nation. According to the proximity of members groups may be face-to-face or comrade groups or they may be dispersed publics. Again the type of control may be made the test. From this point of view groups may be instinct-habit groups or sympathy groups or rational purpose groups. Moreover, as indicated above, groups may be thought of as backward looking or forward looking. All these discriminations have some value. For our present purpose,

however, we are chiefly interested in the life-processes common to all groups, the underlying laws which manifest themselves alike in the boys' gang, the labor union, the church, the coterie, the village, or the nation.

Conflict, competition, and rivalry are the chief causes which force human beings into groups and largely determine what goes on within them. Conflicts like wars, revolutions, riots still persist, but possibly they may be thought of as gradually yielding to competitions which are chiefly economic. Many of these strivings seem almost wholly individual but most of them on careful analysis turn out to be intimately related to group competition. A third form, rivalry, describes struggle for status, for social prestige, for the approval of inclusive publics which form the spectators for such contests. The nation is an arena. of competition and rivalry.

Much of this emulation is of a concealed sort. Beneath the union services of churches there is an element, for the most part unconscious, of rivalry to secure the approval of a public which in these days demands brotherliness and good will rather than proselyting and polemics. Many public subscriptions for a common cause are based upon group rivalry or upon individual competition which is group-determined. The Rhodes scholarships are in one sense a means of furthering imperial interests. Christmas presents lavished upon children often have a bearing upon the ambition of the family to make an impression upon rival domestic groups. In the liberal policy of universities which by adding to the list of admission subjects desire to come into closer relations with the public schools, there is some trace of competition for students and popular applause. The interest which nations manifest in the Hague Tribunal is tinged with a desire to gain the good will of the international, peace-praising public. The professed eagerness of one or both parties in a labor dispute to have the differences settled by arbitration is a form of competition for the favor of the onlooking community. Thus in international relationships and in the life-process of each nation countless groups are in conflict, competition, or rivalry.

This idea of the group seeking survival, mastery, aggrandize