As favoring the growth of the principle and the crystallization of classes, we have chiefly two considerations: the probability of more settled conditions, and the influence of that sharper differentiation of functions which modern life involves.
Social change, as already pointed out, is a main force in breaking up the inheritance of function, and to this must largely be attributed the comparative weakness of the principle in the United States. The changes incident to the settlement of a new country, coinciding with those incident to an economic revolution, have set everything afloat and brought in a somewhat confused and disorderly sort of competition. Our cities, especially, are aggregates of immigrants, most of whom have broken away from early associations, and a large part of whom are performing functions unheard of by their fathers. It is hardly possible that trades should become hereditary when most of them endure less than one man’s lifetime. And something of the same uncertainty runs through commerce and the professions.
Without predicting any great decline in the pace of invention, we may yet expect that the next fifty years will see a great deal of the consolidation that comes with maturity. The population will be comparatively established, in place at least, and the forces making for inheritance will have a chance to work. An immense body of transmitted wealth will exist, and democratic influences will have all they can do to keep it from generating an aristocratic spirit. Industries, professions and trades can hardly fail to be more stable than they have been, and the rural population, as always, will be a stronghold of the forces that favor inheritance.
The sentiment of regard for ancestry, of which caste is the extreme expression, is likely to increase in this and in all new countries. As communities grow older the family line comes more and more under public observation. It is seen, and displayed in memory, wherever any sort of continuity is preserved, and, being seen, it is judged, and the individual shares the credit or discredit of his kin. While this influence is now weak in the United States, on the whole, and is almost absent in the recent and confused life of our cities, it is gaining rapidly wherever—as is generally the case in the East and Southeast outside of large towns—the conditions are settled enough to make the family as a whole a matter of observation. And there can be little doubt that it is increasing in the West wherever it has a similar chance.
In some ways this greater recognition of descent is wholesome. A sense of being part of a kindred, of bearing the honor of a continuing group as well as of a perishing individual, tends to make one a better man; and from this point of view our somewhat disintegrated society might well have more of it.
As to the sharper differentiation that goes with modern life, we see it on all hands. The city is more clearly marked off from the country, in its functions, and is itself broken up into quarters the inhabitants of which have often little or no intercourse with those of other quarters. Trades and professions subdivide into specialties, and, a more elaborate training being demanded, it is more necessary than formerly that a man should know from the start what he wants to do and assiduously prepare himself to do it. Not forgetting that there is another side to this, a side of unification implied in these differences, one may yet say that in themselves they tend to separate people more sharply into social groups which might conceivably become hereditary.
The forces antagonizing inheritance of function come chiefly under two heads, the opposition of ambitious young men and the general current of democratic sentiment.
Caste means restriction of opportunity, and consequently lies across the path of the most energetic part of the people. Its rule can prevail only where individual self-assertion is restrained by ignorance and formal institutions. Under our flexible modern conditions, it is safe to say, no system can endure that does not make a point of propitiating the formidable ambition of youth by at least an apparent freedom of opportunity. Even the inheritance of property is constantly questioned in the minds of the young, and nothing but the lack of a plausible alternative prevents its being more seriously assailed. And since this stronghold of inequality can hardly be shaken, there is all the more demand that it be offset by opening every other kind of advantage, especially in the way of education and training, to whomsoever may be fit to profit by it.
Somewhat vaguer but perhaps even more effective than the resistance of young men is the opposition of the general current of sentiment to any growth of inheritance at the expense of opportunity. To abolish extrinsic inequalities and give each a chance to serve all in his own fit way, is undoubtedly the democratic ideal. In politics this is expressed by doing away with hereditary privilege and basing everything on popular suffrage; in education it is seeking an expression quite as vital by striving to open to every one the training to any function for which he may show fitness. But the spirit of unity and brotherhood is far from satisfied with what has been achieved in these directions, and aspires to bring home to every child that fair access to the fruits of progress which, in spite of theoretical liberty, is now widely lacking. It calls for social democracy, the real presence of freedom and justice in every fibre of the social fabric. To this spirit any increase of the privileges, already unavoidably great, which come by inheritance, is evidently hateful.
In America at least this sentiment is not that of a struggling lower class but of, practically, the whole community. With reference to so vital a part of our traditional ideal there are no classes; all the people feel substantially alike; and there is no public purpose for which wealth is so freely spent as in the support of institutions whose purpose is to keep open the path of opportunity from any condition of life to any other.