[3] Fig. 1.

What now of the causes of progress or decay?  Are not these first of all the qualities and defects inherent in that particular social formation?—­though we must also consider how these different types act and react, how they combine with, transform, subjugate, ruin or replace each other in region after region.  We thus re-interpret the vicissitudes of history in more general terms, those of the differentiation, progress or degeneracy of each occupational and social type, and the ascending and descending oscillations of these types.  In short, these occupational struggles underlie and largely interpret even the conflict of races, upon which Mr. Stuart-Glennie and other sociologists have so ably insisted.  The fundamental importance of these initial factors of region and occupation to all studies of races and types, of communities and institutions, of customs and laws, indeed of language and literature, of religion and art, even of ideals and individualities, must be my excuse if I seem to insist, in season and out of season, upon [Page:  61] the services of Le Play as one of the main founders of sociology; and this not only (a) on account of his monographic surveys of modern industrial life—­those “Monographies Sociales” from which our current economic studies of the condition of the worker, of the family budget, etc., descend—­but (b) yet more on account of his vital reconstruction of anthropology (albeit still far from adequately realised by most anthropologists) through his renewed insistence upon the elemental rustic origins of industry, family types, and social organisation alike, from these simplest reactions of man in his struggle for existence in varied and varying environment.

It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting, pastoral and agricultural formations, as states preliminary to our present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial order of civilisation.  This view, still too commonly surviving, is rather of hindrance than help; what we need is to see our existing civilisation as the complex struggle and resultant of all these types and their developments to-day.  So far, therefore, from leaving, as at present, these simple occupational types to the anthropologist, or at best giving him some scant hospitality within our city museum, we are learning to see how it is at one time the eager miner, or the conservative shepherd, or at another the adventurous fisher or hunter who comes concretely upon the first plane of national, imperial or international politics, and who awakens new strife among these.  We not only begin to see, but the soldier frankly tells us, how the current sports of youth, and the unprecedented militarism of the past century, are alike profoundly connected with the hunting world.  Hence the hope of peace lies not only, as most at present think in the civilised and civilising development of international law, or of culture intercourse, excellent though these are,