THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 343
that no Indian has any rights which a white man is bound to respect. The colonial policy of most European nations today, and of England until after the lesson of the American revolution was taken to heart, illustrates the conception that colonists are not only subjects of the government, but a species of common slaves of the more favored subjects, to be exploited in the interest of the ruling people. It is needless to multiply instances. We are dealing with an element in the situation that has made its impres- sion in various ways upon theories, and is already modifying deliberate programs. The discovery has been made too often to be any longer debatable that one of the factors which fix the metes and bounds of economic action is the moral standard of the people who make the market. We repeat, then, the main thesis of this section, which the foregoing discussion has perhaps needlessly elaborated, namely : Every social incident whatever, be it the daily experience of an individual within a restricted group, or the secular career of a continental society, is deter- mined by forces not wholly within itself. It is a function of a great number of variables, working within conditions that are constant in essence, but changeable in their manifestation in particulars. Every social situation is the product of everything else that exists in the world. To change the situation it is necessary to break the equilibrium of forces that preserves the status by setting free some new kinetic factor. The dependence of each and every social element, whether larger or smaller, upon outlying elements of which it is a part, requires this first step in every process of understanding the social situation, namely : the effort to determine precisely what the particular conditions are that exert a significant influence upon the ele- ment in question.
This program is instinctively adopted after a fashion by every man who tries to deal with concrete social questions. For instance, in all our current treatment of trusts we either seek or we assume an explanation of their origin. How do trusts come to exist ? One man says that they are brought about by the tariff, another that they spring from competition, another that they are produced by criminal collusion with the railroads,
