Edward Alsworth Ross

The Causes of Race Superiority

The superiorities that, at a given time, one people may display over other peoples, are not necessarily racial. Physical inferiorities that disappear as the peoples are equalized in diet and dwelling; mental inferiorities that disappear when the peoples are levelled up in respect to culture and means of education, are due not to race but to condition, not to blood but to surroundings. In accounting for disparities among peoples there are, in fact, two opposite errors into which we may fall. There is the equality fallacy inherited from the earlier thought of the last century, which belittles race differences and has a robust faith in the power of intercourse and school instruction to lift up a backward folk to the level of the best. Then there is the counter fallacy, grown up since Darwin, which exaggerates the race factor and regards the actual differences of peoples as hereditary and fixed.

Uncertainty as a Factor in Production

case which I shall consider in this paper. In venturing on an economic undertaking, one may feel uncertain regarding the ratio of outlay to product or the relation of product to price. The former lies in the field of technique, the latter in the field of exchange, which is traditionally economic, but both affect production in precisely the same way and, hence, should be studied by the economist with equal care. In the first part of this paper I review the causes of variation and compare the different departments of industry in respect to degree of uncertainty. In the second

The Making of the Professions

T HE patron of the artisan or tradesman is presumed to be competent to look out for his interests. For him caveat emptor has been the rule. Bad wares he can reject and poor service he can refuse to pay for. Since the one party is in no need of special protection, the other party has not been subjected to any special restraints. But the patron of a calling which involves the use of highly technical knowledge, since he is not qualified to judge the worth of the service he receives, is in a position of extreme dependence. The patient cannot pronounce upon his doctors treatment. The client cannot test the value of the advice his counsel gives or know whether his cause is properly presented. The student cannot plumb his teachers learning, the reader gauge the editors disinterestedness, nor the creditor verify the audit of the public accountant. One will hesitate to commit ones dearest interests to such men unless one has ground for believing them to be worthy of trust. There is need, therefore, that callings of this confidential character be restricted to men of honor acting with reference to a high standard. The means of bringing this to pass is to elevate the calling into a profession. The expert cannot raise the tone of his calling unless he is shielded from the withering competition of bunglers, quacks and charlatans. So the first step toward creating a profession is the exclusion of the unfit. This is sought by forbidding the practice of the profession to all save those who have been licensed by some board, institution or organization authorized to examine and pass upon the proficiency and character of applicants. Along with this goes often the power to expel from the profession the practitioner whose conduct is such as to bring it into disrepute. It is not enough to bar out unworthy persons. It is

Moot Points in Sociology. III. The Unit of Investigation

IN Bunyans allegory the pilgrims to the Celestial City find, even at the very gateway of heaven, a little wicket that admits to a path leading down to hell. In like manner the student of society, after he has traversed the theological and the metaphysical methods of explaining his facts, and has attained to the very threshold of the scientific method, finds innocent-looking side-paths that lead off into the waste. Two of these-the analogical and the genetic interpretations-have been pointed out in the last paper. I now propose to show how one wanders off into the wilderness by adopting a wrong unit of investigation. That bizarre forerunner of sociology, the philosophy of history, assumed that the experiences of a particular society-Sicily or Poland, for example-are but parts of a single mighty process. The life of humanity-or at least of occidental humanity-can be brought under a single formula. History is a swelling stream formed of the confluence of many tributaries, all taking their rise within the limits of a single vast basin. To explain history as Bossuet would explain it, is to discover the goal of the whole process and the contributory action of each of the various parts. The widening of the ethnological horizon, however, kept bringing into view other valleys traversed by other streams. Hundreds upon hundreds of currents of social development were discovered-no Father of Waters, it is true, like the flood that bears along us occidental niillions, but still rivers having a source and a direction of their own. All the variety the philosophers of history could get came from tracing up some tributary of the occidental current, the Etruscan, the Egyptian, Phcenician, or Hebrew culture. But we have found many independent streams of civilization, such as the Peruvian, Cambodian, Mayan, and Chinese civilizations. What of the Ashantees, the Damaras, the Bantu, the Aztecs, the Amerinds, the Samoyeds, the numerous

The Post-War Intellectual Climate

great concern to the younger housewives and to the status groups of skilled and unskilled labor. Arranged according to room units, the percentages of complaints display a pattern very similar to that observed above in relation to family functions. This is due to the fact that family functions are customarily assigned in a more or less fixed manner to the stereotyped room units available in the modern home.

Commercialization--Increasing or Decreasing?

COMMERCIALIZATION is the increasing subjection of any calling or function to the profits motive. Normally this motive has a large and legitimate part to play in society. To it we appeal in order to call into being the myriad forms of industry and commerce necessary to provide for the wants of the public. Even here, however, it may govern only in a general way. In each particular transaction it should find counterpoise in the desire to keep faith with the patron by supplying only honest goods and loyal services. In a bearer of responsibility, however, such as clergyman, teacher, judge, official, artist and journalist, iil is expected that lust of gain will be quite subordinated to the obligation to render a vital service or discharge an essential function. Into the production of a good or a service may enter various motives which hold the profits motive in check, viz., 1. Pleasure in creative activity; 2. Pride in the perfection of ones product; 3. Accepted standards of technical excellence which forbid the putting forth of a ware or a service which falls below a certain degree of merit; 4. Abhorrence of sham or humbug in ones work. Desire to render loyal service, to market genuine goods; 5. Solicitude for the welfare of the customer or patron prompting one to refuse to supply him with that which will disappoint, defraud or harm him; 6. Doing ones work as a service to society. 1 There is commercialization when the profits motive gains the upper hand of these nobler motives. In case the rela-

Lester Frank Ward

The men who are best qualified by their debt to Professor Ward, and by their consciousness of it, to form a just estimate of his works, shrink from the responsibility ofattempting immediately a formal appreciation of his meaning for sociology. While it is too early for the estimate, at once critical and comprehensive, which those to whom Dr Ward has been preceptor and mentor, hope to put on record after due deliberation, the following tributes will sufficiently mark the place which he has occupied in the esteem of his colleagues, among whom his primacy was always uncontested.

Moot Points in Sociology. IV. The Properties of Group-Units

IN his Study of Sociology Mr. Spencer shows that, just as the form of a pile of bricks or cannon balls is conditioned by the form of the bricks or balls themselves, and the form of crystallization is characteristic for each kind of molecule, so the properties of a social aggregate are derived from and determined by the properties of its members. We should therefore expect that, other things being equal, the diversity of any two societies would correspond to the diversity in character of the peoples composing them. In his Principles of Sociology Mr. Spencer is more cautious. After stating that the primary factors in social phenomena are the characters of the units and the nature of the physical environment (for all minor groupings within a population this factor, being common to all, may be ignored), he goes on to enumerate certain derived factors, one of these being the reciprocal influence of the society and its units: As soon as a combination of men acquires permanence, there begin actions and reactions between the community and each member of it, such that either affects the other in nature; the control exercised by the aggregate over its units tends ever to mould their activities and sentiments and ideas into congruity with social requirements; and these activities, sentiments, and ideas, in so far as they are changed by changing circumstances, tend to remould the society into congruity with themselves.

Social Control, XX: The Vicissitudes of Social Control

NEVER do we find the social pressure uniform through a long period. There are times when society holds the individual as in a vise, and times when he wriggles almost from under the social knee. There are epochs when the corporate will is ascendant, and epochs when the individual is more and more. In other words, social control is in no wise fixed, but varies between strong and weak, between more and less. To describe and to account for these vicissitudes is the purpose of this chapter. The most likely and obvious cause of such vicissitudes is change in social need. The function of control is to preserve that indispensable condition of common life, social order. When this order becomes harder to maintain, there is a demand for more and better control. When this order becomes easier to maintain, the ever-present demand for individual freedom and for toleration makes itself felt. The supply of social control is evoked, as it were, by the demand for it, and is adjusted to that demand. The changes that rack the social frame, and so lead to a tightening of all the nuts and rivets in it, are nearly all connected with economic conditions. The multiplication of numbers or the decline of prosperity may make the struggle for existence more wolfish and harder to keep within bounds. New methods of production which sharpen the economic contrasts within the social group may relax the natural bonds among men, and so throw more strain on the artificial bonds. A static condition of industry may allow differences in wealth to be aggravated by accumulation through a number of generations. A bad institution-a defective system of land tenure, or inheritance, or taxation-working worse and worse as time goes on, may require stronger props to support it. Alien ethnic elements introduced among a people, one in blood and culture and hence fitted to get along smoothly, may increase the tension among them. Social

The Genesis of Ethical Elements

IF we would understand how a race becomes acclimated in a new region-the French in Algiers or the Dutch at the Cape -we must make large use of the principle of selection and survival. The immigrants always vary considerably among themselves in power of resistance to the climate, and if we divide them into two equal groups, of those who are little suited to it, and those who are more suited to it, we shall find the death-rate much higher in the former group. This enables the offspring of the latter group to gain on the others, till in a few generations the immigrating race has, as it were, been made over and adapted to the new climate. Now, this principle of unequal death-rates (or birth-rates) is the key, not only to acclimation, but to all manner of fitnesses in nature. But something very like it is at work in society. There were many styles of gold-washing on the Sacramento in I849. But one style was gradually found to be more convenient than the others, and became after a while the standard way of washing out gold, which newcomers adopted as a matter of course. A like weeding out of inferior individual practices brings to light a standard form of pot or tool or weapon, a standard mode of tilling or breeding, a standard sex relation or education of the young, which is uniform for all, possesses authority, and may be termed a culture element. Besides this evolution of customs and forms of life guided by the principles of convenience, there is an evolution of beliefs guided by the principle of verity. When many sayings concerning anything are afloat, opinions about dreams or sickness or darkness or weather or good luck, the high death-rate among them insures the triumph of those views which for the time and place seem to be the truest. In this way arise general beliefs which come in time to get a good deal of social force behind them.