stition, the prevention of disease, the development of clean politics, the destruction of the philosophy and art of “graft," the reduction of profiteering, the attainment of a high standard of sex purity in young men, the disengagement of the discussion and handling of inter-racial problems from the domain of the mob-mind — all these and many others are enterprises worthy the combative powers of any vigorous youth and sure to test every ounce of energy in him. Competitive athletics may also offer to a limited extent an outlet for the fighting instinct.

But what of the demand for universal service? Will it not postpone the substitution of such equivalents? Not necessarily. Universal service need not frighten anybody if it be understood as community service, civil conscription, universal opportunity, and if it be made to include other forms of training besides military drill. The primary objects are a sense of community responsibility and a measure of discipline. If these can be had only at the price of militarism we must pay it. But a whole array of facts and experiences warn us against paying such a price 'with no questions asked.' Perhaps the very best way of opening a serious offensive upon the social evils which still threaten us would be such a period of compulsory enlistment for public service.

Combat we must have, then, but the arena and the weapons are changing. To no small degree the rate of change depends upon educational ideals and methods, and upon the invention of non-military sanctions powerful enough to evoke a people's supreme effort to unify and express itself. The pugnacious impulse in its most destructive forms has been pretty well reduced within the group through social control. What remains could be canalized. But until some similar provision is made for eliminating the war impulse through international agencies for control

(such as the proposed League to Enforce Peace), until some method is found for transvaluing the motive of national fear, and until some more reasonable means of national recreation or relaxation from the tension of progress is discovered, the hope for progress through the arts of peace is scarcely more than a counsel to illusion.

CHAPTER XX

ON PEACEFUL GROUP CONTACTS

MIGRATION AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION OF CULTURES

MAN is constantly caught between the upper and nether millstones of two opposing impulses, the instinct to root himself to the soil and found home and country, and the lure of wandering without fixed ties of country. Ulysses, the Knights-errant, and recent immigration are all modern types of this age-old conflict of impulses. The tramp and the runaway boy are its less pleasing or at least less convincing manifestations. Both the instinct to "stay put" and the instinct to migrate are primarily connected with problems of the food-quest. But they have a far wider significance from the standpoint of human progress. Migration itself has played a rôle perhaps second to none as a civilizing force. This has come about in two ways: first, by the contact with new physical environments; second, by new human group contacts. I mean here especially peaceful contacts rather than warlike collisions.

Isolation of the individual or small social group means stagnation and degeneracy. Alienists bid us look for the sources of insanity not only in the hurly-burly of great cities with all their super-tense living conditions, but also in the monotonous isolation of country life. Rural peace spells death, unless provided with contacts through books, telephones, and definitely planned institutions for social intercourse.

No grup is self-dealing in is riture elements. It is possible that ex games mating is inconscires working out of some Swing that matitores inbreeding within the rather name masurite Emits of a primitive group was physically degenerative. The importation of wives, even by forcible capture, was deemed necessary for keeping the group blood fresh and string. But the importation of Heas and sentiments was of incomparably greater importante. So far as we know, no human group in the past has ever pulled itself up by its boot straps. It rose, if it rose at all through constant repercussion upon other groups more or less allen to itself.

This is equally true of any modern community which is cut off from the main currents of social life, or which voluntarily through prejudice elects the life of the anchorite. Mr. N. L. Sims, in his excellent study of A Hoosier Village, concludes that "not a single important change has been wrought in any sphere of the village life which has owed

origin primarily to the community itself. The forces

have come from without in the form of various kinds of stimuli. Its activities have been energized and vitalized by disturbing agencies not inherent in the group itself. These extraneous forces have been chiefly either in the form of crises or the coming of new personalities into the village.' "1 Among these crises four stand out as epochmaking for the village, namely, the Civil War, the great economic expansion and prosperity succeeding it, the coming of the railroad, and the rivalry of a neighboring town for the locating of a college. The history-making personalities that broke the village cake of custom included several temperance and prohibition agitators, religious revivalists, new men in the local college faculty, and more or less chance visitors who had seen the world and were willing to give the village the benefit of their wider experience.

But since the Teutons were migrants it is evident that migration alone does not bring with it progress. There must be something stimulating in the new environment. Migration means the throwing overboard of many old traditions. It may also, however, mean sedulously retaining some of them as mementoes of the home land. A colony, for example, may retain old customs and laws which the mother country has long outgrown. The French language in Canada is not the French of twentieth century republican France, but the French of Henri Quatre. We in the United States still hang on to many English common law practices, especially in criminal procedure, which England long ago discarded.

The chief disadvantages of migration are the social instability due to dislocation from a settled abode, the impossibility of forming regular habits of labor, the engendering of a desire for constant change. Migration to a

1 Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, vol. 46, 1912, No. 3, chap. vii.