Socage

“ As a general rule they were personally free, but performed many of the agricultural services of the villains. It is generally-supposed they were called sokemen because they were within the lord’s soke or jurisdiction. Mr Ballard, however, holds that a sokeman was merely a man who rendered services, and 'that a sokeland was land from which services were rendered, and was not neces; sarily under the jurisdiction of a manor. The law term, socage, used of this tenure, is a barbarism, and is formed by adding the French age to soc. ”

“ Better, alas, for any child of the wild folk to go maimed and halt through life than to fall alive into the hands of us humans!
The weeks went by. Summer waxed, until the Barrens were green waves, starred and spangled with flowers, and echoing with bird-songs. All through the long, warm, flower-scented nights the raccoon family feasted and frolicked, and the little ones grew apace. One velvety warm night, when the crescent moon had sunk in the west, Father Coon led his family toward the farm lands, which year by year crept farther into the Barrens. ”

“ The real essence of the cause rests in the inner activity and its execution, in the systematic unceasing pulsation which keeps everybody busy, the youth, as well as the men and women, show an indefatigable aim at perfection in the moral pressure on the thoughts and feelings of the whole camp, at the continuous concentration of all powers which manifest themselves from time to time in undertakings that rouse the whole nation and even foreign lands into admiration.
At present the Sokol institution is no more a mere favourite pastime of a special society ”

“ Of the Sokol system was to effect its extensive national mission, it was obliged to adapt itself to the social conditions in which we live and which present the majority of grown—up in workshops, industrial or commercial establishments, or in offices, from devoting any time during the day to their training, it was obliged to democratise itself and to become accessible to the broadest classes. ”

“ In the warm fragrant dusk, the whole family trotted in a long, leisurely procession through the underbrush, until they came to a broad bank of warm, white sand that overhung the deep waters of the stream which wound its silent way like a brown snake through the Barrens. Here, in a half-circle, the whole family crouched and dozed comfortably, with their pointed, striped noses on their forepaws, while the dusk deepened into the soft-scented, velvet blackness of a summer night. For long they stayed there, in the still patience which only the wild folk possess. ”

“ How can it be otherwise, when a system prevails which whirls families and scatters their members, as the wind whirls and scatters the leaves of autumn? These shores of refuge, like the eternal shore, often unite again, in glad communion, hearts that for long years have mourned each other as lost. ”

“ By examining the nomads who still lead the pastoral life on the steppes, he shows the kind of social organisation to which this pastoral life inevitably gives rise and under which they lived; and he traces the effects which such occupation and such social organisation produce on the mental qualities of a people. ”

“ They learned, too, how to hunt frogs, and to grub up mussels, and to catch those little fresh-water lobsters, the crawfish, without getting their fingers nipped.
The Cleanly children made few mistakes, and hardly ever disobeyed their parents. There was a reason. Disobedience among the wild folk means death, and he who makes one mistake often never gets a chance to make another. The sister of the littlest coon was a sad example of this fact. She decided to become a reformer. ”

“ It has been said that the civilization of a community is [Pg 92] measured by the amount of soap that it consumes, and it is almost the same thing to say that the refinement of a household is measured by the amount of water it uses. ”

“ To establish the priority of the forms thus imposed by blood relationship, we have but to remember that, as the relationship of individuals to one another preceded everything else, so the social forms based upon blood relationship must have preceded all other social forms. We are therefore to regard as the earliest stage of social organization that of groups bound together by blood relationship. ”

“ Of course, accidents will happen in wild-folk families just as among us humans, only in a wild-folk family, an accident is more apt to be fatal. It was the oldest of the three little Cleanlys, after the reformer had gone, who suffered first. He had been hunting in the wildest part of the five-mile circle, which the family used, and it was after sunrise when he scrambled out of the shallow pool where he had been frogging. ”

“ Now the house will become identified with a family or perhaps with a clan. In the same manner a village community or a township will be imagined as a collective being, which—although not in all, yet in certain important respects—remains the same in essence, notwithstanding a shifting of matter; that is to say, an incessant elimination of waste portions—men who die—and a constant accretion of fresh elements—born children. Here the analogy with the essential characteristics of an organism is obvious. ”

“ Not only is coöperation found among the external organs, but our study of the vital processes has shown that the principle of coöperation is carried out by the internal organs as well. The fact that all the activities of the body are directed toward a common purpose makes the coöperation of its parts a necessity. ”

“ A group may not have understood the facts of reproduction and procreation (as the Arunta are said not to understand them) , [22] but the facts of blood connection, and of the relation of the blood to the life, could escape no human beings. [23] As savages undeniably do not draw the line between beasts and other things on one side, and men on the other, as we do, it was natural for them to suppose that the animal bearing the group name, and therefore solidaire with the group, was united with it, as the members of the group themselves were visibly united, namely, by the blood bond. ”

“ In the same way the group-soul which has reached the highest levels of the animal kingdom will not individualize into primitive savages, but into men of somewhat higher type, the primitive savages being recruited from group-souls which have left the animal kingdom at a lower level.
Group-souls at any level or at all levels arrange themselves into seven great types, according to the Minister of the Deity through whom their life has poured forth. ”

“ That country forms the center of a politically and socially troubled country; many an individual are weary of mere palliative measures. They desire a complete reform beginning with the heart and branching into all the different branches of activity.
[From the Guardian:]
This is just a word that I wish to add in person, assuring you and the dear friends in Esslingen of my great love for you and my continued prayers for your welfare and spiritual advancement. I will tenderly remember you at the three holy Shrines and will supplicate for each of you Divine Guidance and Strength. ”

“ On the one hand, one may regard the hydractinia or the siphonophora as a complex individual whose organs are the fishing, the piloting, the reproductive, etc., individuals. On the other hand, it may be maintained that the food-providers, pilots, etc., are true individuals whose aggregation forms a society. In short, it is an undifferentiated state, in which individuals and community are hardly to be distinguished from one another, and are only two different aspects of the same whole. ”

“ A Citizen Scout should also understand the health conditions in her own neighborhood and have full information as to food, water, and milk supply, the ashes and garbage disposal, street cleaning and other matters relating to the public health in her community. ”

“ It gives the starting point of human society after mankind had emerged from a still lower condition and entered the organism of the consanguine family. From this first form to the second the transition was natural; a development from a lower into a higher social condition through observation and experience. It was a result of the improvable mental and moral qualities which belong to the human species. The consanguine and punaluan families represent the substance of human progress through the greater part of the period of savagery. ”

“ Where social life runs in moulds, hardened by civilization or specialization, crystallized in caste, class, group, league, and various other organizations of a highly complex structure, there the social aggregate tends to develop more and more connective tissue fibre of the inactive, supporting type. ”

“ But the whole process of social evolution is one of very gradual assimilation, and neither in the world as a whole, in the nation or race, or in the tribe, clan, family, locality, or class, is it one of equal advance on all sides. The coöperation adopted may be, at different points, that of individuals against individuals, of tribes against tribes, of nations against nations, or of classes against classes. ”

“ Again and again came to mind the comparison of the entire colony or army with a single organism; and now the home, the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body of this strange amorphous organism—housing the spirit of the army. One thinks of a column of foragers as a tendril with only the tip sensitive and growing and moving, while the corpuscle-like individual ants are driven in the current of blind instinct to and fro, [65] on their chemical errands. ”

“ The opinion a member has of his duties towards himself, his surroundings, and towards the entire world has its influence on his whole civil life, on his personal honour and worth; so the Sokol idea forms itself gradually into the conception of a perfect civil virtue founded on the soundness and steadiness of the body. ”

“ Nowhere any constructive or commanding force which had thought out, for instance, and brought to pass flowers, trees, animals, men—associative order and community life. On the contrary, the beauty of nature as well as the order of all living, such as it is, was an accident, and not even a necessary one, yet unescapable, a condition or link in an accidental chain. ”

“ A real flash of light was struck when German students perceived the connexion between the widely prevalent common or open field system of husbandry, and the village community which for centuries had used it as a shell. ”

“ That social organization is presupposed in the adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted. But the social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the body to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual has a certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented by the place and functions of the other organs. ”

“ The scene before us is rather that which the animal world presents to the mental eye of those who have the courage to bring home to themselves the facts answering to the memorable theory of Natural Selection. Each fierce little community is perpetually at war with its neighbour, tribe with tribe, village with village. ”

“ I see before me, gathered together to discuss matters relating to our common welfare, the most eminent members of our ancient, famous, sylvan and carnivorous community. Alas, other animals, envious and slanderous creatures, have spread the report that we are unsocial, divided, inhabiting each his own patch of jungle, incapable of united action. ”

“ Since, then, it is chiefly the soil, the vital condition of our tissues, which resists disease, we must do our part in making that soil good or bad for disease. That is why our hygiene, our obedience to the individual laws of our own experience, which show us [Pg 133] how we can keep well and how we get sick, must be learned and taught by every one of us so far as we can in such a place as a dispensary or a patient's home. ”

“ Turning from the towns to the agricultural population, where we have the right to expect the fullest measure of health, we find a condition of things which strikes an observer with dismay. The cultivators [Pg 226] of the soil constitute the backbone of a nation. ”

“ It was accordant with the rural element in the character of us both, that a portion of the family subsistence should be drawn from our own cultivated soil. This we considered both congenial to health and that consciousness of independence which is one of the pleasantest parts of a life of agriculture. ”

“ There are Bible classes and prayer-meetings and church services where six hundred people will be jammed into the room for four hundred, and men sweat, and children reprove one another’s behavior, and babies yell and splutter and suck, and when service is over the congregation rush with their hymn-books to smack the mosquitoes on the walls and see the blood spurt out. ”

“ Social life, however, acting upon the cells as it acts upon the members of a human family, soon created differences among them—differences ever deepened by continuance, and which, by narrowing the limits of each colonist's activity, and increasing his dependence on the rest, rendered him fitter for his special task. ”

“ The discovery meant more than a supply of food and the staving-off of death by starvation; with the possession of resources that, with care, might last for weeks there came into being a common interest, the fellowship that makes a social system. After the first wild struggle—the rush to fill their hands and cram their gnawing stomachs—the shadows and skeletons of men controlled their instincts and took counsel; the fact that their stomachs were full and their craving satisfied gave back to them the power of construction, of forethought and restraint ”