them to deplore that the immigrant is encouraged to acquire education and thereby rise superior to that class in which it has pleased God to call him. I need not again discuss that phase of an extremely complicated and as yet undetermined result of our highly refined social system. It may be true that the perfect clodhopper is ruined and the perfect "gentleman" is not produced in the process, and there are people who will deplore the failure to accomplish the perfect result and maintain that nothing has been gained and the labor and cost have been wasted, but that must remain a matter of individual opinion. What is a fact, and is neither theory nor speculation, is that the whole life of the boy and his habit of thought are affected by this taste of city life. Either the lure of the city is too strong to be withstood, and he turns his back on the farm and seeks fortune in the city, which is one of the reasons why more and more the farm boy drifts to the city; or if he is content to go back to the land and follow in the footsteps of his father, he walks with head more erect and his feet more firmly planted. He has known intellectual discipline and is the better for it; he has rubbed elbows with men and has seen human nature in its various aspects; he may not understand the full meaning of life, but he has been unable to escape from some of its teachings; and culture and refinement, instead of being things to be despised, assume a virtue of their own. He brings to the farm and his commu

nity a message; his influence affects the lives of his neighbors. It will take a great many years to work a radical change in the agricultural element in the United States, but that change is going on,-not easily observable from month to month, but noticeable from year to year, strikingly so if we contrast one decade with another. Back and forth that influence flows, from the farm to the city and from the city to the farm, making the farmer take a more rational view of life and the motives of men, and making men in the cities, the politicians especially, treat the farmer, not as a spoiled child who must be pampered and coddled if a display of temper is to be avoided, but as a sensible being who can be argued with and is capable of reasoning. The result is nationally a broadening of vision and a saner concept of life; a more rational judgment and a lessening temptation to create distrust and suspicion and find an unworthy purpose in all that is done.

It is worth while before leaving the subject to note that the augmentation of the city population by the rural has had no influence on the people who dwell in the cities, but changes in time, and usually a very brief time, the character and habits and view of life of the rural element attracted to the city. On a smaller scale the same process is at work that is continuously converting the immigrant into an American; it is the working of the same irrefutable law that makes a lower civilization yield to a higher

and causes the lower to imitate the superior, and in the process acquire some at least of the characteristics of the dominant people. It is the workings of this law that explain why the immigrant has not dragged down the American to his own level; for the same reason the young man from the farm and the country, who brings to the city the simple ways and pure life (according to tradition) of the farmer, rapidly comes to live and think as does the man whose place of birth is the city and who has spent all his life among its environments. Men adapt themselves to their moral and material conditions exactly as they do to their physical; they overcome Nature not by foolishly fighting it, but by yielding to it and making Nature their servant instead of their master. The immigrant, despite his numerical strength, is too puny to be able to change an established civilization, and must submit to it or be beaten in the struggle; the man from the farm must take on the ways and methods of the city or remain a farmer, and in that case he has been conquered by the city and goes back to the farm in despair.

CHAPTER XXII

DEMOCRACY, THE DEMAGOGUE, AND SOME DETAILS

THE first decade of the twentieth century, the decade following the Spanish War, will always be noteworthy in the history of American sociology. In some respects it has no historical parallel, and is one of the most extraordinary phases of social development the world has ever seen. It is the influence of the "moral uplift," the assumed ethical regeneration of the American people, which is popularly supposed to have wrought a stupendous change in American character.

It has been told elsewhere1 why the American people held the law in light respect, and that peculiar conditions made it possible for the commercial pirate to flourish. In the days of piracy on the seas we may be sure that men who were engaged in legitimate trade looked upon piracy as a shocking and shameful thing; in the privacy of their counting-rooms merchants whose ventures had failed because their galleons had fallen the prey of pirates must have denounced the imbecility or cowardice of a government that permitted piracy to flourish; women whose husbands had been made to walk the plank, and men whose

1 Vide chapter xiv.

sons were the victims of the rovers of the sea, must in their grief have accused the government of profiting by piracy - as it often did and fatalistically resigned themselves to the inevitable. Piracy, as I have elsewhere said, flourished and was tolerated as a recognized institution so long as it was sanctioned by the moral conscience of the age, and it received its death-blow only when nations became more enlightened and more humane and public opinion was strong enough to make itself heard;1 but a long period had to elapse before their intelgence was appealed to and their humanity was touched. I have written to little purpose if I have not made it plain that every historical movement which leads to progress and a higher plane of social development begins in the consciousness of a people that there are evils to be corrected or conditions to be made better. A feeling that is vague and nebulous slowly takes form and word until it gains strength and culminates in an explosion, either in

1 "What is it that has rendered murder a rare exception instead of a frequent social event? It is not the existence of statutes which make murder a crime; it is the growth of a public opinion which makes the individual condemn himself and his friends, as well as his enemies, for indulgence in that propensity. There were laws enough against murder in Italy five hundred years ago; but these laws were practically inoperative, because they had not really formed part of the social conscience, as they have to-day. On the other hand, the social conscience of medieval Italy, with all its laxity in the matter of murder, was strict in certain matters of commercial trust, on which it is to-day relatively loose. A man actually forfeited self-respect by a questionable financial transaction in those days as he did not forfeit it by the murder of two or three of his best friends. As a consequence, that particular kind of financial immorality was much rarer then than it is now." Hadley: The Education of the American Citizen, p. 28.