Social mobility

“ In the third place, we must endeavour, by means of our system of education, to increase the mobility of labour. In the modern State, where changes in the industrial organisation are frequent, the worker who can most easily adapt himself to changing circumstances is best assured of constant employment, and a great part of the social evils of our time may be traced to this want of mobility on the part of a large number of our workers. ”

“ The mobility of city life, with its increase in the number and intensity of stimulations, tends inevitably to confuse and to demoralize the person. For an essential element in the mores and in personal morality is consistency, consistency of the type that is natural in the social control of the primary group. Where mobility is the greatest, and where in consequence primary controls break down completely, as in the zone of deterioration in the modern city, there develop areas of demoralization, of promiscuity, and of vice. ”

“ To what extent do children follow the vocations of their parents and why? To what extent do individuals move from one class to another, and how does this fact modify the character of class relationships? News and the mobility of the social group.—The division of labor, in making individual success dependent upon concentration upon a special task, has had the effect of increasing the interdependence of the different vocations. A social organization is thus created in which the individual becomes increasingly dependent upon the community of which he is an indivisible part. ”

“ A complete analysis of the bearing upon personal and cultural life of changes from a society based upon contacts of continuity and of primary relations to a society of increasing mobility organized around secondary contacts cannot be given here. Certain of the most obvious contrasts of the transition may, however, be stated. Increasing mobility of persons in society almost inevitably leads to change and therefore to loss of continuity. In primary groups, where social life moves slowly, there is a greater sense of continuity than in secondary groups where it moves rapidly. ”

“ But I should like to say a word or two about one of the countervailing advantages of town life, which is often insisted on and that is, that by the mobility and stimulus it affords, it encourages that ascent of individuals from the lower to the upper social ranks upon which the salvation of society depends. ”

“ The attendant increase in educational opportunities has made it possible for individuals to gain the skill and background required to fill these jobs and, thereby, move up the social ladder. This mobility has been aided by the government's determined effort to reshuffle society by improving the social status and opportunities of the formerly underprivileged groups and by denying them to the formerly privileged ones. ”

“ Psychological moments may arise in any social situation, but they occur more frequently in a society which has acquired a high state of mobility. They occur more frequently in a society where education is general, where railways, telegraph, and the printing press have become an indispensable part of the social economy. They occur more frequently in cities than in smaller communities. In the crowd and the public every moment may be said to be "psychological."
Crisis may be said to be the normal condition on the exchanges. ”

“ In our studies of the city it is found that areas of mobility are also the regions in which are found juvenile delinquency, boys’ gangs, crime, poverty, wife desertion, divorce, abandoned infants, vice.
These concrete situations show why mobility is perhaps the best index of the state of metabolism of the city. Mobility may be thought of in more than a fanciful sense, as the “pulse of the community.” ”

“ And, more important and suggestive yet, mark this: whereas, in historic beginnings, nothing but the home of the family existed; slowly, as we have grown, has developed the home of the individual. The first wider movement of social life meant a freer flux of population,—trade, commerce, exchange, communication. Along river courses and sea margins, from canoe to steamship, along paths and roads as they made them, from “shank’s mare to the iron horse,” faster and freer, wider and oftener, the individual human beings have flowed and mingled in the life that is humanity. ”

“ The lines of transportation and communication are the arteries that carry the exchange of products—circulation of the blood—throughout the whole body social, that effect personal and mental intercourse between man and man. They are, consequently, highly calculated to establish an equal level of well-being and culture throughout society. The extension and ramification of the most perfect means of transportation and communication into the remotest corners of the land is, accordingly, a necessity and a matter of general social interest. ”

“ His habits, manners, education, language, and dress, clearly warrant us in so disposing of him; although, on the one hand, we have placed him where his company may be scarcely considered an honour; and, on the other, his peculiar connexions, though celebrated, in one sense of the word, for taking everybody in, are reputed to be of an exclusive character.
Those who know any thing of the Mobility are aware, that one very frequent expression of theirs, indicating a desire to occupy the station of such and such a person, is, "I wish I was in his shoes." ”

“ As isolation may be due to the existence of purely physical barriers to communication, or to a peculiarity of temperament and a lack of education, so mobility may be a consequence of the natural means of communication, or of an agreeable manner and a college education.
It is now clearly recognized that what we ordinarily call a lack of intelligence in individuals, races, and communities, is frequently a result of isolation. On the other hand, the mobility of a population is unquestionably a very large factor in its intellectual development. ”

“ The use of the Mobility is, to produce food, habitation, and clothing, for the superior classes, and to perform for them those various offices, which, though essential to existence, are not of a dignified quality. ”

“ Our gentle readers, we apprehend, have but little regarded the Mobility in passing through our public thoroughfares. When employed in taking the air, they move in a loftier line than that of the pavement, and, occupied with the momentous cares of the Senate, the Opera, and the Ball, are too deeply absorbed in meditation to cast their eyes below. ”

“ Not only transportation and communication, but the segregation of the urban population, tends to facilitate the mobility of the individual man. The processes of segregation establish moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate. This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly and easily from one moral milieu to another and encourages the fascinating but dangerous experiment of living at the same time in several different contiguous, perhaps, but widely separated worlds. ”

“ V. A class of dependents, defectives and delinquents, supported by society but contributing little or nothing to its maintenance or its advancement.
Every civilization has maintained a greater or lesser degree of mobility between the classes. Mobility makes it possible for those with greater ability and energy to leave the countryside, settle near the market-place and climb the ladder of success. It has also made it possible for policy makers to dump those whose services are no longer needed or wanted by the ruling oligarchy. ”

“ The property most common to all the Mobility is poverty; that is to say, no property at all. It is not usual to describe them as a respectable body, but they are an influential one, and their influence has, of late years, been much augmented. Perhaps, also, as they constitute the operative part of the community, and its physical force, they may be regarded as being, in a national point of view, of some little importance: but all who have any pretensions to delicacy look upon them as disagreable persons. ”

“ Moreover, mobility is almost an essential quality of the spirit of democracy, the free way to the farthest horizons, the open road to the highest position and service. When the atom becomes practically fixed by its environment, reposeful and stable, stratification sets in. We may or we may not have then something better.
It may seem to you a far cry from those rough, lawless coureurs de bois to the mobile but orderly people of that valley to-day. ”

“ Is it any wonder that people, when they have an opportunity, migrate to the city? There is a social instinct moving the human heart. All people are gregarious. Adults as well as children like to be where others are, and so where some people congregate others tend to do likewise. ”

“ As soon as the urban population, as a result of the development of the means of transportation, methods of production, etc., is enabled to transfer to the country all its accustomed requirements of culture, its institutions [433] of learning, museums, theaters, concert-halls, libraries, social centers, etc., the migration will begin. Life will offer all the advantages of the former large city without its disadvantages. ”

“ Another little improvement, and one unattended by the slightest expense, might so easily be made in the condition of the Children of the Mobility, that we wonder that no benevolent individual has hitherto endeavoured to effect it. A glance at the group now under consideration must convince the most tasteless observer that the youthful personages therein depicted are supporting themselves on their feet in the most ungraceful posture imaginable. ”

“ The manners of the Mobility are neither sweet nor refined; there is none of the lump-sugar of humanity in them. It is true that one laundress will address another as "Ma'am," and that the driver of a public cabriolet will speak of a locomotive vegetable vender as "that other gentleman;" ”

“ Returning to the public life of society, we find two features in which there seems to be a connection between changes that are going on and the modern conditions of transportation, viz., the democratic tendencies of society, and the prevalence of materialism. The democratic tendency, which is peculiar to the times, does not limit itself to exhibition in state constitutions, but is penetrating the whole social life. ”

“ Is not some one’s carriage at the Society’s disposal in which she may be taken—she is too weak to walk and has not been out for two and a half years—to catch a glimpse of the bright spring flowers and the new-budding trees? ”

“ The increased vibration in human nature and in the human brain and heart that go with the motor-car habit, the increased speed of the human motor, the gearing up of the central power house in society everywhere is going to make men capable of unheard-of social technique. The social consciousness is becoming the common man's daily habit. ”

“ In both the facility of moving from place to place, and finding a distant home, tends to dissolve the closeness of civic and family life, and to make the individual rather than the family or the city the unit of social life. ”

“ And first let us deal with the commoner material aspects of life in which there have been great changes and improvements in recent times 301and in which, therefore, it is easiest to imagine still further betterment, given only an assuagement of strife and blind struggle and a spreading out of generosity and the feeling of community from international to social affairs.
Take transport, that very fundamental social concern. It is ripe for great advances. There is all the labor needed in the world, all the skill and knowledge needed, and all the material needed, for these advances. ”

“ Mobility may in the end supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction and interdependence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible, preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past, and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and many-hued experience. Organization may cease to be taken as an end in itself. ”

“ Their nature demands larger scope in an expanding environment. To [170] them the stirring town beckons, and they are restless until they escape. The city is a centre of social life where the individual feels a greater stimulus than in the home or the rural community. It resembles the family and the village in providing social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. ”

“ Country life as at present organized does not afford the best opportunity for the satisfaction of this social instinct. The great variety of social attractions [Pg 22] constitutes the lure of the city—it is the powerful social magnet. ”

“ Here is a creature, inheriting the wide reach of the modern mind; that socially-developed mind begotten of centuries of broadest human intercourse; and, in our later years of diffused education, rapid transit, and dizzying spread of industrial processes, increasing its range and intensity with each generation. This tremendous engine, the healthy use of which requires contact with the whole field of social stimulus to keep up its supplies, and the whole field of social activity for free discharge, we expect to find peaceful expression in its own single house. ”

“ The Mobility have various amusements, most of which are exceedingly low, and which have been in these enlightened times judiciously curtailed by the Legislature. Indeed they can scarcely indulge in any of them without impropriety; for they are supposed, during six days, to be continually occupied, and on the seventh to be enjoying, like the better classes, the sweets of domestic life. Instead of that, they go, on Sundays, to a public-house, provided there may be no pecuniary obstacle to their doing so. ”