In this whole connection it appears that the group consciousness and the individual himself are formed by communication and participation, and that the communication and participation are themselves dependent for their meaning on common interests.
But it would be an error to assume that participation always implies an intimate personal, face-to-face relation. Specialists participate notably and productively in our common life, but this is evidently not on the basis of personal association with their neighbors. Darwin was assisted by Lyell, Owen, and other contemporaries in working out a new definition of the situation, but these men were not his neighbors. When Mayer worked out his theory of the transmutation of energy, his neighbors in the village of Heilbronn were so far from participating that they twice confined him in insane asylums. A postage stamp may be a more efficient instrument of participation than a village meeting.
Defining the situation with reference to the participation of the immigrant is of course not solving the problem of immigration. This involves an analysis of the whole significance of the qualitative and quantitative character of a population, with reference to any given values—standards of living, individual level of efficiency, liberty and determinism, etc. We have, for instance, in America a certain level of culture, depending, let us say as a minimum, on the perpetuation of our public-school system. But, if by some conceivable lusus naturae the birth rate was multiplied a hundred fold, or by some conceivable cataclysm a hundred million African blacks were landed annually on our eastern coast and an equal number of Chinese coolies on our western coast, then we should have neither teachers enough nor buildings enough nor material resources enough to impart even the three R's to a fraction of the population, and the outlook of democracy, so far as it is dependent upon participation, would become very dismal. On the other hand, it is conceivable that certain immigrant populations in certain numbers, with their special temperaments, endowments, and social heritages, would contribute positively and increasingly to our stock of civilization. These are questions to be determined, but certainly if the immigrant is admitted on any basis whatever the condition of his Americanization is that he shall have the widest and freest opportunity to contribute in his own way to the common fund of knowledge, ideas, and ideals which makes up the culture of our common country. It is only in this way that the immigrant can "participate" in the fullest sense of the term.
III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS
1. Assimilation and Amalgamation
The literature upon assimilation falls naturally under three main heads: (1) assimilation and amalgamation; (2) the conflict and fusion of cultures; and (3) immigration and Americanization.
Literature on assimilation is very largely a by-product of the controversy in regard to the relative superiority and inferiority of races. This controversy owes its existence, in the present century, to the publication in 1854 of Gobineau's The Inequality of Human Races. This treatise appeared at a time when the dominant peoples of Europe were engaged in extending their benevolent protection over all the "unprotected" lesser breeds, and this book offered a justification, on biological grounds, of the domination of the "inferior" by the "superior" races.
Gobineau's theory, and that of the schools which have perpetuated and elaborated his doctrines, defined culture as an essentially racial trait. Other races might accommodate themselves to, but could not originate nor maintain a superior culture. This is the aristocratic theory of the inequalities of races and, as might be expected, was received with enthusiasm by the chauvinists of the "strong" nations.
The opposing school is disposed to treat the existing civilizations as largely the result of historical accident. The superior peoples are those who have had access to the accumulated cultural materials of the peoples that preceded them. Modern Europe owes its civilization to the fact that it went to school to the ancients. The inferior peoples are those who did not have this advantage.
Ratzel was one of the first to venture the theory that the natural and the cultural peoples were fundamentally alike and that the existing differences, great as they are, were due to geographical and cultural isolation of the less advanced races. Boas' Mind of Primitive Man is the most systematic and critical statement of that view of the matter.