agrarian system with its stability and repetition; the increased numbers and power of the middle class; new social customs caused by economic changes and new discoveries; the migration of peoples; and the building of new societies in the colonial realm. This point of view is especially significant for an understanding of the beginnings of American history. It shows us, as Payne, Shepherd, Andrews, Osgood, Beer and Bolton have insisted, that our origins can only be understood when viewed as a phase of the expansion movement. Nothing could be more fatal to the correct perspective than the conventional approach through the avenue of the alleged divinely guided antecedents of the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787.138

The sociological historian uses the data brought forward by the economic and social historians, but he goes somewhat deeper than either and looks upon the change as a process of supplanting one social system by another. To him it appears as something more than an interesting complex of new concrete facts and events. It is one of the few really epoch-making changes in the social and cultural evolution of the race, comparable to the beginning of regulated social life in tribal society, or the origins of civil society. He tries to discover all the elements entering into and growing out of this significant process of social change and to estimate their relative importance.189

138 By far the best example of this mode of analysis is J. E. Gillespie, The Influence of Oversea Expansion on England to 1700; and H. E. Bolton and T. M. Marshall, The Colonization of North America. Significant contributions are also to be found in J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation; and in selected chapters in W. C. Abbott, The Expansion of Europe; A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History; J. B. Botsford, English Society in the Eighteenth Century; and J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England.

139 I have tried to organize the phases of the rise of the modern order as a sociologically trained historian might view them in my Social History of the Western World, pp. 83-98. No adequate sociological history of the evolution of modern society has been produced. Gillespie's above-mentioned book brings forward much valuable data. W. R. Shepherd's "Expansion of Europe," in the Political Science Quarterly, 1919, is a masterly summary of the initial force in producing the modern age. An illuminating concrete study is A. Reichwein, The Influence of China on Europe in the Eighteenth Century. The pertinent sections of K. Lamprecht's Deutsche Geschichte, and K. Breysig's Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit cover the facts from a socio

The historian trained as a sociologist looks upon this process in its broadest sense as the result of a contact of cultures, unprecedented in scope and potency. Civilization ceased to rest on a thalassic basis and entered upon the oceanic stage-the chief arena of history shifted, first from the Mediterranean to northern and western Europe, and then to the expansion of Europe overseas. These changes were the products of general European tendencies and were not, as Professor Lybyer has shown, caused by any such catastrophic episode as the Turkish seizure of the trade routes. Beginning with the Crusades, European society came into contact with the ideas, economic products and social institutions of other peoples. As cultural anthropologists and sociologists have long insisted, the contact of cultures is the most effective force in breaking down stability and provincialism and in stimulating curiosity and progressive impulses. One of the great results of this cultural interpenetration was the rise of skepticism, criticism, and interest in science-a general reaction against the premises and aspirations of the "age of faith." 140 The other was the varied complex of new developments flowing out of the substitution of world-trade for local or thalassic exchange, the rise of capital and its dynamic influences, and the increase in the numbers and the power of the middle class.141

In the field of politics the sociologist sees feudalism supplanted, first, by secular, royal absolutism, and then by bourgeois parliamentarianism, in each case the change logical point of view, but with a personal bias in favor of a definite scheme of social evolution. Much profound analysis is contained in the type of works produced by Sombart, Hobson and Veblen. The first important textbook to appropriate something of the sociological point of view was C. J. H. Hayes' Political and Social History of Modern Europe.

140 W. E. H. Lecky, Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe; J. B. Bury, History of the Freedom of Thought; and The Idea of Progress; A. C. McGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant, Chap. x.

141 Cunningham, Western Civilization, Book V, Chap. ii; Pollard, Factors in Modern History, Chaps, ii, iii, vi, vii, x; C. Day, History of Commerce, Part III; W. C. Abbott, The Expansion of Europe, Chaps. x, xxxi, xxxiii; Botsford, op. cit.; J. A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, Chap. i.

being forwarded by the economic transformation.142 The English, American and French Revolutions thereby lose their unique and epic character and fall logically within the pattern of political behavior produced by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Law, likewise, was brought into the service of the new order. Roman law sustained secular absolutism, while appropriate legislation was later devised to protect the new economic and commercial institutions and the growing spirit of business enterprise. Economic and political theories were originated or adapted to defend the bourgeois system. Laissez-faire and the freedom of trade gradually supplanted Mercantilism, which royal ambitions and early mistakes of the merchants had established in western Europe. The theory of natural rights, the origin of society and government in a bipartite contract, the justification of revolution, the rise of parliamentary government, and the origin of constitutionalism constitute the chief political aspirations and achievements of the middle class.143

Even the theology was readjusted to meet the needs of a developing commercial and industrial order. In more than one way the Reformation was a phase of the bourgeois revolution. Calvin stressed the virtue in thrift and labor, and attacked the orthodox Catholic opposition to interesttaking. Puritan theology stressed money-making as the most "God-given" of occupations. The man who failed to accumulate pecuniary profit was akin to the unwise steward who wrapped his talent in the napkin. Richard Baxter contended that the man who rejected the utmost possible

143 C. J. H. Hayes, Political and Social History of Modern Europe, Vol. I; R. H. Gretton, The English Middle Class; C. Becker, The Beginnings of the American People; and The Declaration of Independence; A. M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution; S. Herbert, The Fall of Feudalism in France; W. K. Wallace, The Trend of History, Book I.

143 P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Medieval Europe; W. A. Dunning, Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu; L. H. Haney, History of Economic Thought, Chaps. vii-x; C. H. Van Tyne, The Causes of the War of Independence; C. Becker, The Declaration of Independence,

pecuniary profit ceased thereby to be "God's steward.” Sermons were preached from the text: "Seek ye not your own, but your neighbors' wealth." 144 The Commercial Revolution and its complex results had produced a new world; yet its greatest achievement was to prepare the way for the Industrial Revolution and the creation of contemporary civilization, which was to carry to a far higher development all of the tendencies set in motion by the Commercial Revolution.

6. The Sociological Background of the Development of Contemporary Civilization Since the Industrial Revolution.

Though an eminent contemporary American historian insists on telling his class in medieval history that there are but two events in human history worthy of the historian's attention the siege of Troy and the French Revolutionmost thoughtful historians have admitted, though their chief interest might lie in another period, that the Industrial Revolution of the last two centuries has caused more far-reaching changes in human society than had previously taken place since the period of the union of upper and lower Egypt under Menes. Professor Shotwell puts the matter admirably when he asks: "What is the Renaissance or Reformation, the Empire of Charlemagne or of Cæsar, compared with the empire of mind and industry, which has penetrated the whole world, planting its cities as it goes, binding the whole together by railroad and telegraph, until the thing we call civilization has drawn the isolated communities of the old régime into a great world organism,

P. Smith, The Age of the Reformation, pp. 724-9; W. J. Ashley, Economic History, Vol. I, Part II, pp. 456 ff.; M. Weber, "Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus,'' in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozial-politik, 1905. A critical analysis of the views of Weber was included in a paper by Professor Clive Day on the economic doctrines of the Puritans, read before the American Historical Association at Washington, December, 1920.

with its afferent and efferent nerves of news and capital reaching to its finger tips in the markets of the frontier?” On account of the great social dislocation produced by the Industrial Revolution, the development of contemporary civilization furnishes one of the most convincing sociological illustrations of rapid social transformation and the shifting of economic and social systems. It also constitutes an admirable historical example of the processes of social causation.145

England was the natural country in which the Industrial Revolution should have had its origin. It had been most affected by the rising trade and commerce, and by the resulting economic, social and political changes, which had been important aspects of the reaction of the expansion of Europe and the Commercial Revolution upon European society. The middle-class Puritan business man was most numerous in England. The unusual development of skepticism, critical thought and tolerance produced a favorable ground for the rise of natural science, which, in England, took the form of practical and applied science. This made possible the new machine technique and the new steam power. The peculiar type of staple goods, in which England had specialized, was well adapted for the introduction of the machine technique, while the geographical factors of ample supplies of coal and iron in close proximity and a damp climate to aid textile processes cannot be ignored. There was also an unprecedented supply of available and mobile capital and labor. The antecedents of the Industrial Revolution in England thus furnish an almost ideal example of the sociological thesis that many factors must be considered in the analysis of the rise of a new social and economic system. Here we have general cultural antecedents, a new manufacturing technique, and geo

145 Cf. J. A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism; T. Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise, Chaps. ii, ix; L. Knowles, The Industrial and Commercial Revolutions; W. Bowden, Industrial Society in England towards the End of the Eighteenth Century.