In 1908, sixty-six per cent of those entering were destined for the five states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, the great majority, of course, to find a home in the "foreign colonies" of the larger cities. Governmental action is not called for to enforce assimilation or to dictate its methods, but rather to insure a proper environment for it, by preventing massing and by so adjusting distribution that assimilation will take care of itself.

In the world-contacts of independent racial groups the process of accommodation differs from that where two racial masses are struggling for the mastery within the same area and where the end sought is immediate absorption. Easy and rapid communication, along with the spread of education, is making over the peoples of the earth into a world-community. The adjustment among them is still far from complete, nor is cooperation sympathetic or harmonious. The volatile urban community, with its quick response to numerous and simultaneous stimuli, is coming to set the tone for all modern societies. Among groups as among individuals the subjective type of mind is becoming the characteristic one. Lamprecht designates the recent period as the age of nervosity. As the great races have become better acquainted with one another they have developed a certain degree of self-satisfaction and a corresponding touchiness. Doubtless the asperities of mere race animosity are already softening and are destined to still further soften, and if so it must be through the same process as that by which individuals are accommodated to each other, by common contact through a long period with a given set of cultural institutions. For if any one fact in recent world-history is clear it is that the institutions of civilization are being standardized. Tarde has said that civilization has gone around the world and come back again, so that its chief phases are no longer local but planetary. For individuals this may result in a sharper differentiation, but for societies the consequence will be gradual integration.

How far this process may lead no man can foresee. Ward believes that pacific assimilation, now that war is ceasing, will

ultimately bring about a blending of the separate races into a single generalized type or world-race. 81 Assimilation of races, however, implies some elements not involved in the assimilation of cultures. The one denotes primary association, the other secondary. And since in primary association physical elements furnish the chief basis of attraction, these are likely to retain their old dominance long after a fair degree of cultural unity has been attained. The consciousness of physical kind, for one thing, is more elementary and primitive than cultural affinity, and its movements are slow for the same reason that the processes of natural selection are slow.

While, therefore, this century seems destined to be a period of internationalism and of a limited degree of cultural cosmopolitanism, just as the nineteenth century was the age of nationalism, there is no reason to believe that the races will be merged in a universal melting-pot.32 Both the ethnic and cultural differences between certain human groups are so great that general amalgamation is for the present out of the question. Ward himself admits that "the only kind of social assimilation that is increasingly fertile is that between races that occupy substantially the same social position. The case is very similar to that of sexual reproduction. For successful crossing the individuals must belong to the same species and not be too different."33

Ward says further:

"There are some races whose culture differs so widely from that of others that they seem to form an exception to this law [of amalgamation]. They are theoretically but not practically assimilable."34

"Pure Sociology, 215 ff.; Applied Sociology, 108; American Journal of Sociology, VIII, 733. "The forces antagonizing the assimilating process are enumerated by Sarah E. Simon in the American Journal of Sociology, VI, 822.

"Pure Sociology, 215.

"Dealey and Ward, Textbook of Sociology, 213. Bryce points out the physical difficulties in the way of general amalgamation: "The mixture of whites and negroes, or of whites and Hindus, or of American aborigines and negroes, seldom shows good results. The hybrid stocks, if not inferior in physical strength to either of those whence they spring, are apparently less persistent, and might, so at least some observers hold, die out if they did not marry back into one or other of the parent races."—Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind, 24, 25.

One phase of extra-racial and extra-national assimilation is beyond controversy. Racial and geographical solidarity is already to a limited extent giving place to interracial and international class solidarity. Tolstoy says that the laboring classes of the great modern states are destitute of patriotism, that they have become indifferent to the state as such. Social classes will increasingly consolidate as the consciousness of common class interests grows more general. The socialist ideal of an international class-conscious industrial group is typical of what other classes may ultimately attain. The higher aristocracies of all countries already have this class-sense well developed, as royalty long has had.

A summary of the processes of contact and assimilation, so far as they relate to racial elements, yields certain principles which have some of the characteristics of established laws: (1) the law of isolation and hostility; (2) the law of inequality and stratification; (3) the law of superior attraction; (4) the law of attrition and accommodation; (5) the law of massing and numbers; (6) the law of diffusion and percolation; (7) the law of the standardization of cultures; (8) the law of the increasing fluidity of culture; (9) the law of persistence and survival.

The rough test and proof of race assimilation lies in the possibility of general and successful intermarriage.35 Wherever orderly race-crossing becomes a settled practice it will be found that the types are so near to each other in both physical and cultural character that no serious problems arise from their blending. The offspring will no longer constitute a special class of half-breeds or mongrels, and there will be no clash of conflicting types, with resulting discredit to one or the other. Variation is now confined within limits which cause no rift in the social structure. On the physical side there is a normal degree of vigor and permanency, and on the cultural side there is an orthodox body of cultural interests equal or superior to those of either of the parent elements.

Is The writer has discussed some of the social aspects of race-crossing in a paper on "Race and Marriage" in the American Journal of Sociology for January, 1910.

THE "SOCIAL FORCES" ERROR

EDWARD CARY HAYES
University of Illinois

At the World's Congress of Arts and Sciences which was held at St. Louis in 1904, I ventured to enter a protest against the loose way in which the word "force" is employed by sociologists, saying among other things that sociologists have no more occasion to refer to any "social force" than the biologists have to speak of a "vital force."

There is a concept of force in general, to which I raise no objection, and there is a concept of social forces in particular, which is the object of my criticism. The former is the general metaphysical concept of power. In this sense according to prevalent modern philosophy there is but One Force which underlies and continuously causes all things that do appear, and is operative in the swinging of the spheres, in the bubbling of gases, and in the chemistry of growth in every grass blade. According to the theory of evolution the operation of The Force appeared first in the simplest phenomena, not however absolutely without differences among themselves. These simple phenomena became the conditions of other phenomena which, being added to the first, made a more complex situation and afforded the conditions for still other manifestations, or as we say, other phenomena, every new kind of phenomena being added to those which had preceded to form the conditions of still higher manifestations of the One Power. Scientific explanation is the description of the situation out of which a new kind of phenomena emerges a statement of those conditions which are the necessary logical antecedents of the phenomena explained.

Now as often as we come across a kind of phenomena the conditioning of which we do not understand, we are tempted to say it is caused by a force. It is indeed caused by The Force

as all phenomena are, if we accept the metaphysics just outlined; but what we are tempted to say is that any particular phenomena, the conditioning of which we cannot unravel, are caused by a force. And if there are many kinds of phenomena which we cannot explain we suppose a large number of forces. one for each great unsolved problem in causation. This is the second meaning of the word "force," and the one to which I object. Every time that we solve one of these problems we get rid of a supposed force and replace it with a statement of the recognized combination of conditions under which the One Force operates in the causation of the phenomena thus explained.

It is in this way that we pass from what Comte called the metaphysical to what he called the positive stage of explanation. We are in the metaphysical stage as long as we imagine a number of forces, about which we know nothing save that each is the supposed cause of a kind of phenomena, the real causation of which we do not understand. We are in the scientific stage when we have replaced these "forces" with explanations stated in terms of antecedent phenomena, or when we have at least gone far enough to become convinced that such explanation is possible, so that we give up talking about the supposed force which we had used as a false denial of our ignorance and offered as a stone to the hunger of the mind. Thus biology completes the passage from the metaphysical to the scientific stage when it ceases to talk about a vital force and becomes convinced that the phenomena of life are really explicable in terms of kinds of phenomena already studied by antecedent sciences, particularly physics and chemistry. Thus also sociology will pass from the metaphysical to the scientific stage when it ceases to talk about social forces and becomes convinced that social phenomena can be explained in terms of logically antecedent phenomena.

I have referred to biology because biology is the most recent science to pass from the metaphysical to the scientific stage ;*

While sociology has only begun to free itself from the doctrine of "forces," biology has gone so far in the direction of actual scientific explanation that only a remnant of reactionaries, with hardly any representatives among American biologists of standing, continue to make use of the concept of "vital force." The leader of the reactionaries—or as an American biologist