INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 769
associations of capitalists and of laborers, coalitions, strikes, etc. How many new social relations have sprung up and are continu- ously springing up! How many profound causes of inequality and lack of equilibrium at the interior, and, besides, how many barbarous and warlike nations at the exterior ! How to make up for the deficiency of understanding and of co-operation at the interior; how to assure the preservation and the defense of so many peoples united rather by force than by their vows and by common justice; how to suppress this social question of all times and especially of the last periods, a question so vital in all Greek cities that was the problem. All this unstable equilibrium of the new civilization could be secured peacefully only by listening to the voice of the great social reformers ; but these had influence only several centuries later. Plato and Aristotle belonged rather to the future than to their own times. These were still in the hands of the military powers. Thus a center of warriors' civiliza- tion was formed outside of Greece, at its frontiers, where brutal force, in contact with other barbarians, raged with the utmost rudeness ; a center of warriors' civilization that conquered Greece, Asia, and Egypt, and finally became only a province of the empire it had helped to found. All these regions, reunited in the same dominion, and already partially amalgamated by their commercial and other relations, saw for some time their political frontiers wiped out and replaced by divisions that were purely adminis- trative and military, under a unique authority. This empire is already international and inter-continental; indeed, it ties together the most homogeneous parts of three continents. It is, at the same time, continental and maritime; it encompasses the different civilizations that were developed at the banks of the large rivers and seas. It extends to the Mediterranean, the Ionian, the ^Egean, and the Black Sea; it touches the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea. It ever spreads more in width than in length; yet it already extends far to the north. In reality, it has no physical boundaries ; it comprehends all the large basins. Yet so many inequalities still exist between these different regions, and between the groups, castes, and classes of each region, that equilibrium can be established only by aid of a
