Edward Alsworth Ross

“ Could we imagine a society in which prison or pillory carried no hint of shame, caused no forfeiture of public esteem, no loss of religious peace, no wound to self-respect—and this is the case of political offenders in many countries—its legal penalties would have just the deterrence they would have in the hands of brigands pirates, invaders or despots. It is when this wholesome alliance between society and the police is broken that virtue departs out of the law and it ceases to bind men. ”

“ Such a moralist, with the one hand stroking the arching back of Self-Will, and trimming its claws with the other, is a most useful, nay, even precious functionary of society. Not small is the service of him who, snaring with the bird-lime of eloquence or the silken net of fallacy that fell ravager the Ego, spares the laborious pit or stockade.
But, if it be true that there is a divergence between the interests of the ordinary individual and the interests of the containing group, we cannot call such a one a scientist. ”

“ There is to-day so little sympathy with that remote, narrow New England theocracy that it is well to state again in living terms what part the coming of the best of the English Puritans bore in building up the American people.
As history makers, those who will suffer loss and exile rather than give up an ideal that has somehow taken hold of them are well nigh as unlike ordinary folk as if they had dropped from Mars. In every generation those who are capable of heroic devotion to any ideal whatsoever are only a remnant. ”

“ As the moulding of the individual's feelings and desires to suit the needs of the group is the profoundest alteration of associated life, we must regard it as the highest and most difficult work of society, the achievement which most signally shows its presence and power. When an aggregate reacts on the aims of the individual, warping him out of his self-regarding course, and drawing his feet into the highway of common weal, it merits the title of "society," whether or not there be rule and obedience, division of labor and exchange. ”

“ The immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During the last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and from being a twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen to be a tenth. This freshet is not born of religious or political oppression, for Italy enjoys a government on modern lines, created by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic. ”

“ The power of wealth or place to command an entourage of flatterers makes extremely difficult the control of rulers by public opinion. Between throne and people hangs oftentimes a thick curtain of obsequious courtiers and buzzing sychophants that shut away unwelcome murmurs till the gathering whirlwind of popular indignation tears away the curtain and topples over the throne.
The might of public wrath is destroyed by anything that diverts it from an individual and spreads it harmlessly over a network of administrative responsibility. ”

“ As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American competition brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed immigrants. But not all this stuff is of value in a democracy like ours. Only a people endowed with a steady attention, a slow-fuse temper, and a persistent will can organize itself for success in the international rivalries to come. So far as the American people consents to incorporate with itself great numbers of wavering, excitable, impulsive persons who cannot organize themselves, it must in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or to both. ”

“ It is not a science of group tyranny, needing, as a corrective to its one-sidedness, a science of ethics that shall regard conduct from the side of the individual. It is quite competent to comprehend in its view at once the benefits of restraints or sacrifices on the one hand, and their costs on the other, and to seek the point of equilibrium between them. It accordingly holds the balance true between the individual as restrained and the individual as a member of the public and hence beneficiary of the restraint. No science of ethics, therefore, can assist sociology to its conclusion. ”

“ Unlike the German artisan who becomes fond of what he creates, the Jew does not love the concrete for its own sake. What he cares for is the value in it. Hence he is rarely a good artisan, and perhaps the reason why he makes his craft a mere stepping-stone to business is that he does not relish his work. The Jew shines in literature, music and acting—the arts of expression—but not often is he an artist in the manipulation of materials. In theology, law and diplomacy—which involve the abstract—the Jewish mind has distinguished itself more than in technology or the study of nature. ”

“ Now the instinct of an angered public is to refuse these coöperations by which we live and have our being. First to be refused will be, of course, those offices that spring from good will and entail trouble. Disapproval will interrupt the friendly aid rendered between neighbors. Stopping the straying ox, warning of the unsafe culvert, helping house the hay from the wet, lifting the mired cart, nursing the sick—all these services that require one to go out of his way—cease. So with those coöperations, the benefits of which are one-sided, "accommodations" we call them. ”

“ This is the reason why a German settlement spreads on fat soil and why in time the best land in the region is likely to come into German hands. Unlike the restless American, with his ears ever pricked to the hail of distant opportunity, the phlegmatic German identifies himself with his farm, and feels a pride in keeping it in the family generation after generation. Taking fewer chances in the lottery of life than his enterprising Scotch-Irish or limber-minded Yankee neighbor, he has drawn from it fewer big prizes, but also fewer blanks. ”

“ In the seventeenth century the peoples of the Old World seemed to be at odds with one another. Race trampled on race, and the tender new shoots of religious yearning were bruised by an iron state and an iron church. The rumor of a virgin land where the oppressed might dwell in peace drew together a population varied, but rich in the spirited and in idealists. What a contrast between the English colonies and those of the orthodox powers! ”

“ Looking from above, sympathy appears as compassion, the impulse to help another by denying one's self. Looking from below, it appears as envy, the impulse to relieve one's distress by sharing in the good fortune of another. In either case, extreme unlikeness of condition inspires feelings which tend to lessen or remove that unlikeness. But the differentiating group is riddled with inequality, so that, did it trust itself to spontaneous feelings, apart from law and morality, it would be ground to powder between compassion and envy as between the upper and the nether millstone. ”

“ The citizens are made to thresh over again old straw—the relation of church to state, of church to school, of state to parent, of law to the liquor trade. Meanwhile, ripe sheaves ready to yield the wheat of wisdom under the flails of discussion lie untouched. Pressing questions—public hygiene, conservation, the control of monopoly, the protection of labor, go to the foot of the docket, and public interests suffer. ”

“ Though claiming to be experts in values and adepts in the art of getting the most out of life, and all the while professing loyalty to the interests of the individual they undertake to advise, they really hold a brief from society. They are disguised emissaries, unavowed apostles of social order, unaccredited agents of control, bent on gyving the individual rather than on sending him to his goal by the smoothest path. Under color of giving him friendly counsel they betray him into the service of the community. ”

“ In point of literacy they lead the world. One finds an illiterate among every twenty German immigrants of more than fourteen years of age. Of immigrants from other nations, one may find an illiterate among every twenty-three Dutch, thirty-eight Irish, fifty-two Welsh, fifty-nine Bohemians, seventy-seven Finns, one hundred English, and one hundred and forty-three Scotch; but the proportion among those who come from Scandinavia is one in two hundred and fifty. What a contrast between these and the Lithuanians and South Italians, half of whom are unable to read any language! ”

“ The strength and the weakness of sympathy must now be apparent. Love of others will safeguard the family and a circle of friends, but it will not hold a man to his duty toward that large body of fellow citizens for whom he has no feeling but indifference. It will check men when the evil of a deed is sure to fall upon a known individual, but not when it lost in the vague mass called "the public." One who will shrink from self-aggrandizement when the harm to others can be clearly visualized, will not hesitate at a foul deed when the consequences, though vast, are vague and indefinite. ”

“ Work does not agree with us. We have friends who work and give us money. Why not?" It is these parasites who commit most of the crime. Their honest fellow-countrymen shrink from them, yet, if one of them is arrested, some make it a point of honor to swear him off, while all scrupulously forget anything against him. Thanks to this perverse idea of "honor," an Italian murder may be committed in the street in broad daylight, with dozens looking on, yet a few minutes later every spectator will deny to the police that he has seen anything. ”

“ In seeking that which is most distinctive in society, it is not necessary to pause at the threshold, finger on lip, and contemplate the outlines of a colossal Something, Leviathan, Superorganism, Social Organism, Social Body or other amorphous monster, composed of millions of human beings, and having distinct parts, motions, activities and aims. Society there certainly is, but it is better to begin the study of the human complex by surveying its work, rather than by describing a half-mythical entity. ”

“ What if we become crowded without their ceasing to be so? I regard it as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions of life here be made permanent by high standards of living, institutions and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth their copying when the time came. ”

“ Yet it will not do to look upon law as an obsolescent form of control beyond which society is rapidly passing. Granting that out of a hundred law-abiding only one obeys the law from fear of its penalties, it does not follow that the penal system holds a correspondingly insignificant place in the system of control. If the one rascal out of a hundred men were permitted to trespass with impunity, the force of example and the contagion of lawlessness would weaken the higher forms of control and detach man after man from the ninety-nine honest men. ”

“ Rugged Norway freezes into the souls of her sons a sense of the preciousness of level, fertile land, and there are no great cities to infect the imagination of her country dwellers. What wonder, then, that in 1900 nearly four-fifths of our Norwegians were outside the cities, most of them sticking to the soil like limpets to a rock! ”

“ The growing reliance of men upon each other in order to get the economic advantages of cooperation strengthens the grip of the group on the individual. Liable as he is to have his life course changed and his prosperity blighted by the resentful action of his fellows, he is loath to fly in the face of the common will. The increasing contact of men and the better facilities for forming and focusing the public will also point the same way. The day of the sturdy backwoodsman, settler, flatboatman or prospector, defiant not alone of law but of public opinion as well, is gone never to return. ”

“ The efficiency of the social system, into which the individual thus endowed is born, is tested by its power to shape him, far more thoroughly than his heredity has shaped him, to life in society, by its power to build on the foundation afforded by instinct story after story of obedience and loyalty and public spirit. As soon as societies acquire this power a striking change takes place in the significance of inter-group conflicts. Whereas formerly the group with the more altruistic members survived, now the victory often falls to the society with the better system of artificial control. ”

“ Many observers, after allowing for their illiteracy and lack of opportunity, still insist that they have little to contribute to our people. "These people haven't any natural ability to transmit," said a large employer of Slavs. "You may grind and polish dull minds all you want to in the public schools, but you never will get a keen edge on them because the steel is poor." "They aren't up to the American grade," insisted the manager of a steel-works. "We have a 'suggestion box,' and we reward valuable suggestions from our men, but precious few ever come from immigrant labor." ”

“ How can woman-worth go on rising as this country fills with people who have the brood-mare idea of woman? Yet leaders in the cause of womanhood are doing their best to hold the door open for the very tribes who most despise and misuse their sex! On the other hand, the new immigration may well find favor in the eyes of those who look upon the bearing of ten children as woman's best lot, and are complacent at seeing the stocks with low standards outbreed and crowd into oblivion the stocks with high standards. ”

“ It may be literally true, that the chief formation of a long-drawn social life is not the relation of authority and subordination between parts of the group, not the gradation of its members into classes, not the systems of sustaining, transporting or regulating organs, but certain ideals and standards, certain likes and dislikes, certain admirations and abhorrences become common to its members. Here then, I venture to suggest, is the ultimate test of association. The abiding of men in the same neighborhood without conflict is mere aggregation. ”