Concluding remarks by Professor Thomas Response by Professor Commons ARE CONTRADICTIONS OF IDEAS AND BELIEFS LIKELY TO PLAY SOCIAL CLASSES IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 1 LESTER F. WARD Many questions supposed to have been definitively settled have been revived and brought into new prominence under the searchlight of modern sociological theory. The discovery of the principle of the natural origin of political society and the juridical state out of gentile society and kinship organization through the struggle and amalgamation of races is having an effect upon social problems analogous to that which the discovery of the principle of natural selection has had upon biological problems. One of the time-worn social problems of this order is that of the origin and nature of social classes. Approaching this problem from the new point of view, we find that it constitutes an integral part of the general social process inaugurated by the race struggle. There are no social classes in gentile society. They must have developed along with all the other institutions which had their origin at that stage. If so, out of which one of those early institutions have they developed? Can the sociologist trace them back to their primary source, as the anatomist traces any organ of the body back to its original layer in the embryo? As is well known, one of the first effects of the conquest is the subdivision of the amalgamating group into a series of more or less distinct strata called castes. The conquering race becomes the high caste and the conquered race the low caste. Between them there soon develops an intermediate caste necessary to the life of the group. The high caste differentiates into a sacerdotal caste and a warrior caste. The intermediate caste is developed out of the intelligent elements of both the conquering and the con1 Address of the president of the American Sociological Society at its second annual meeting in Madison, Wis., December 28, 1907. .quered races and conducts the business of the new society. The lower caste performs the labor for all, either as a great slave population or as an artisan class, often divided up into a great number of hereditary sub-castes or guilds. Now the simple truth is that the social classes that we find today in the most advanced nations of the world are the outgrowth and natural successors of those primary subdivisions of society, or castes. They are modified castes and have not been greatly transformed during the historic period. The four socalled "estates" of European history, so clearly recognized in the eighteenth century, correspond well to the four great castes of India. The Brahminic caste, or priestly order, became the First Estate, the lords spiritual, the clergy; the Kshatriyas, or warriors and ruling class, took the name of the Second Estate, the lords temporal, the nobility; the Vaisyas, or merchants, brokers, and business class, scarcely differ from the Third Estate, the commons of England, the bourgeoisie of France; and the Sudras, or laborers and artisans, are clearly represented by the Fourth Estate, the modern industrials, the proletariat. But the castes of India are not the only castes, and it is now known that they exist in all countries that have undergone the race struggle, and that they are in all essential respects the same in all, being found in great completeness even in Polynesia. With the lapse of ages, especially in India where the race struggle probably first took place, these castes became firmly established and were regarded not only as the order of nature but as the divine order. It was forgotten that they arose from conquest. All traces of those remote events were lost, and the higher castes were believed to be really superior and the lower really inferior. This is clearly shown by the text of the Laws of Manu. We there read that: The Brahmin in coming into the world is placed in the first rank upon the earth; sovereign lord of all beings, he watches over the preservation of the treasure of civil and religious laws. A Brahmin, by his very birth, is an object of veneration, even by the gods, and his decisions are an authority for the world; it is the Holy Scripture which gives him this privilege. All that the world contains is in a manner the property of the Brahmin; by his ancestry and his eminent birth he has a right to all that exists. A Brahmin, if he is in need, may in all safety of conscience appropriate the goods of a Sudra, his slave, and the king may not punish him; for a slave has nothing that belongs to him in his own right of which his master may not deprive him. A Brahmin possessing the Rig Veda entire would not be soiled by any crime, even if he had killed all the inhabitants of the three worlds and accepted food from the vilest of men. The Kshatriyas cannot prosper without the Brahmins; the Brahmins cannot support themselves without the Kshatriyas; by uniting, the sacerdotal class and the warrior class rise in this world and in the other. Blind obedience to the orders of the Brahmins, versed in the knowledge of the holy books, masters of the house and renowned for their virtue, is the chief duty of a Sudra and procures for him happiness after his death. To serve the Brahmins is declared the most praiseworthy action for a Sudra; everything else that he may do is without recompense for him. A Sudra must not amass superfluous wealth, even when he has the power; for a Sudra, when he has acquired a fortune, vexes the Brahmins by his insolence. A man of low caste who attempts to sit down by the side of a man of the highest class shall be branded on his haunches and banished. Let the king cause boiling oil to be poured into his mouth and ears if he has the impudence to give advice to Brahmins relative to their duties. He who has relations with a degraded man is himself degraded; not alone in sacrificing, in reading the Holy Scriptures, or in contracting an alliance with him, but even in getting into the same carriage, sitting on the same seat, or eating at the same table. Such are the rigid laws by which the higher castes have sought to separate themselves from the lower, and they have succeeded in causing it to be believed, not only by the higher castes but also by the lower ones themselves, that there exists a fundamental difference based on inherent qualities and belonging to the nature of things. This idea still clings to the mind of man, and modern social classes are conceived to be marked off from one another by nature. The Greeks were a conquering race who invaded Greece as well as Asia Minor ages before the Homeric period and subjugated the peoples whom they found there, reducing them to slavery. As written history began much later still, it had been wholly forgotten who the slaves were, and they were looked upon as simply inferior beings created to serve the high-caste race with which alone all Greek history and literature have to do. All know that Plato and Aristotle spoke of the slave population in this tone, contending that both they and all "barbarians" were intended by nature for slavery, a proposition which Aristotle considered "self-evident." His most classic expression, familiar of course to all, but needed at this point, was: There are in the human race individuals as inferior to others as the body is to the soul, or as the beast is to man; these are beings suitable for the labors of the body alone, and incapable of doing anything more perfect. These individuals are destined by nature to slavery because there is nothing better for them to do than to obey. . . . . Nature creates some men for liberty and others for slavery.2 This view scarcely differs from that of the classical economists with regard to wage-earners, and it reflects somewhat accurately the popular ideas even today on the question of social classes. The slaves of Greece and Rome, the plebeians of later Rome, the serfs and villains of feudal times, and the laboring and menial classes of all ages have belonged to a different race from that of the citizens, patricians, nobles, lords, and upper classes generally. They represent the conquered races of the world, and had occupied those social positions since long before there was any written history of the countries in which they lived. It is this fact that concealed their true origin for so long and obscured the great ethnic principle that underlies the social classes. The idea pre| vailed universally that they were naturally inferior, and that the existence of social classes was a natural condition and must always continue. But it is now beginning to be seen that the existence of lower classes was the result of early subjugation in the struggle of races which took place in the savage state of man. Although this truth was discovered by sociologists, still the sociologists are among the last to recognize it. Certain jurists have seen that it accords with the history of jurisprudence and are bringing it forward as the groundwork of that science. Speaking of blood-revenge in primitive societies, M. Raoul de la Grasserie says: It does not exist among castes or classes, for these do not originate at the beginning. They are formed only after the conquest. The Pariahs of India 2 Politics, I, 5. |