An inevitable result of this racial antipathy found wherever whites of English-speaking stock and blacks are thrown together is the emergence within the social order of two distinct racial groups with very little in common apart from the most general participation in political and social institutions. This division of society into two groups is inevitable so long as there exists an unwritten law refusing social sanction to intermarriage between blacks and whites, and there is no possible way in which democratic or any other social or political institutions can prevent such a division. The group division will of course be less consciously felt by society at large where either the whites or blacks are very much in the majority. This explains the seemingly paradoxical situation that race friction is least in evidence in the Far North, where the Negro is a very small percentage of the population, and also in the heart of the "black belt" where the whites form a correspondingly small percentage.

This dichotomy of the social organism presents a very interesting situation for the student of the social mind. The social self is born and grows to maturity in the midst of a social heritage which is composed of the group habits and group ideals which have been slowly accumulated through generations of homogeneous group life. The perfection and the authoritativeness of the social heritage depends upon a long and unbroken group life. The selfpoise of homogeneous and highly civilized peoples and their ability to produce men of high moral and cultural attainment is due to this feeling of the undisputed supremacy of group ideals among all classes of men. When an ideal or a custom fails to find the support of the group as a whole it speedily loses its authoritativeness and its educative power. For the same reason ideals or customs which are of fundamental importance for the welfare of the group as a whole receive the undisputed support of all members and those inclined to ignore or defy them are speedily eliminated.

The situation of the southern white where the social order is equally divided between two separate racial groups with habits of life and thought differing fundamentally from each other is a critical one. The social conscience owes its authoritativeness and even its very existence and with it the existence of the social sanctions

that guarantee a permanent civilization to a feeling of unity and social solidarity among all the members of the social order. But where there are two separate and autonomous groups this is impossible and the logical result of such a situation would be the disintegration of the social order entirely if the forces here at work were allowed free play. A permanent social order is possible only where one or other of the two sets of social values represented by the two groups secures and maintains an undisputed supremacy, or where there is a fusion of the two groups through intermarriage, which alone makes it possible for all the members of the social order alike to attain that similarity of selfhood necessary to complete social solidarity and a common loyalty to common group ideals. Of nothing is it so true as of the sanctions of human conduct that "a house divided against itself shall not stand."

This brings us very close to the heart of the race question as we find it in the South and wherever the white lives among masses of the blacks, and herein lies the justification of "white supremacy." When we eliminate the exhibitions of brutal race hatred which are usually taken by superficial and prejudiced critics as typical of the entire situation the alternatives before the guardians of white civilization are either the admission of the Negro through intermarriage to complete social solidarity which would eliminate entirely the dualism of the social mind in the most natural and complete fashion or the setting aside of the Negro in a group to himself and the insistence upon his recognition of the supremacy of the white group. This makes a modus vivendi possible. It seems hard that the Negro should be required to attain selfhood as best he can outside the higher cultural possibilities of the white group and subordinated to that group, and yet what other alternative would the social philosopher offer us? He certainly would not ask of the white group the supreme sacrifice of its ethnic purity which is the bearer of its social heritage and, therefore, the ultimate guarantee of the continuity and integrity of its peculiar type of civilization.

We are now prepared to understand why the full and complete social integration of the Negro is impossible. Such social integration as does exist must be based upon mutual concessions and

compromises. The conditions of the greatest harmony will be, as already suggested, where the weaker group accepts unconditionally the will of the stronger group. Conditions of friction will inevitably occur where the weaker group refuses to accept these conditions. "The most fruitful conditions of race friction may be expected where there is a constant insistence upon a theoretical equality of the weaker group which the stronger denies." Starting with racial antipathy as a fixed and irreducible element in the problem, it is undoubtedly true that the farther we get from slavery and the nearer an approximation of the theoretical claims of democracy the more difficult social integration appears. It has indeed been asserted that slavery is the only condition under which a weaker race of widely different traits can enjoy intimate social relations with a stronger without friction. It is doubtless true that in spite of fifty years of freedom, the Negro, especially in the South, enjoys as a race fewer points of contact with the white and is less an integral part of the social order than he was in the days of slavery.

* Stone, Studies in the American Race Question, p. 223.

1

THE SOCIAL WASTE OF UNGUIDED PERSONAL

ABILITY

ERVILLE B. WOODS
Dartmouth College

It has been pointed out by a number of writers that the wellknown difference between the birth-rate of the well-to-do classes and that of the more rapidly multiplying laboring classes is fraught with serious consequences. It is asserted that the upward movement of the able from class to class, and from the country to the city, segregates the brains and the energy, the ambitions and the capacity of the nation in a section of the population which is dying out by the process of class suicide. Society is thus represented as selecting for extinction its most capable breeds and becoming in consequence an aggregate of increasingly mediocre individuals. One might well suppose from such considerations that the case of modern society is hopeless.

There is the possibility, however, that the machinery of selection does not work with quite the ruthless thoroughness imputed to it. There are a number of considerations which cast doubt upon this assumption. (1) The ability or capacity which leads to success is far from being simple, uniform, or commensurable. It may almost be defined as any variation which proves to be favorable in a given environment. There is probably no variation which would not prove of advantage in some environment. It is because successful people are so indefinitely different among themselves are so many kinds of variants, in other words-that it is perhaps doubtful whether if they mated exclusively among themselves their offspring would be distinguished particularly from the offspring of the rest of the population. (2) Much ability, many of the valuable variations are the result not of inheritance but of development and specialization of effort only. The attention of one individual for some reason is drawn off from all other subjects and directed to one task exclusively; that individual succeeds; even ill-health by limiting the

number of personal interests sometimes accomplishes this end; a second individual lavishing attention upon several objects attends with conspicuous success to none. Here is apparently a difference in ability, but hardly a difference likely to be repeated in the following generation. Until exact psychic measurements are further perfected, it is hazardous to estimate the importance of the two sets of causes, hereditary on the one hand, and on the other those connected with economy and concentration of attention. (3) Ability receives its reward only when it is presented with the opportunities of a fairly favorable environment, its peculiarly indispensable sort of environment. Naval commanders are not likely to be developed in the Transvaal, nor literary men and artists in the soft coal fields of western Pennsylvania. For ten men who succeed as investigators, inventors, or diplomatists, there may be and probably are in some communities fifty more who would succeed better under the same circumstances.

In these failures of well-endowed individuals and in the artificial successes of poorly endowed favorites, there may be a crumb of consolation for the social biologist who might rejoice that a few brands escape the burning in which success consumes itself, but to the social economist the waste of social materials involved appears to be a most serious loss in itself.

Professor Lester F. Ward, in his Applied Sociology, has stated and elaborated this point of view most cogently. Following the way which he has blazed, it should not be difficult to point out certain limitations upon the social selections under discussion.

In the present discussion I shall confine myself to education understood in a broad sense as an agency in the selection of personal ability, for, of all the agencies by which individuals may be qualified to play a distinctive rôle in society and one in accordance with their inherited capabilities, education is undoubtedly the greatest.

The imperfect results which our educational system achieves are the result mainly of the undue abbreviation of the period of training for most individuals and of the omission of elements of training of real significance for the purpose of adjusting individuals to social tasks. The crucial question is whether all of those individuals are getting into the running who are capable of putting up the best race,