558 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
for the aggression of man on man, and hence invariably revives primitive practices of personal vengeance. Along with the individualism of the Italian Renaissance, for instance, went a demoniac energy of self-help.
Among the symptoms of triumphant egoism are the decline of patriotism and public spirit. In degenerate Italy, in dying Greece, in decrepit Egypt, the state, unable to rouse her citizens, fights her battles with condottieri. The cosmopolitan spirit pre- vails over the national spirit. Men expatriate themselves cheer- fully for the sake of comfort or security. Foreign domination is endured or even welcomed. The claims of the community rank below the claims of caste. Money-getting is more attract- ive than public life. Politics is followed as a lucrative trade. Justice and administration become hopelessly rotten because enough good men cannot be found. The phrases and trappings of public spirit being retained after the sentiment has fled, hypocrisy infects all civic life.
Again, the family bonds are less rigid. The young are ear- lier freed from paternal authority. Women are ^emancipated without being uplifted. Enamored of self, men shrink from marital obligations. Increasing divorce shows that the family is felt to be a means of pleasure rather than a social organ. But while functional associations such as family, local community, city, and fatherland lose their hold on the individual, there is an efflorescence of associations like the religious sect, the fraternal order, the guild, the club, the social circle all those unions, in fact, which spring from free inclination and gratify social crav- ings. Men unite, if at all, on a purely human basis, so that the sweetest flowers of friendship blossom in the eager atmosphere of individualism. Such times sound the heights and depths of human nature.
In these crises, when the ego has been unleashed by the decay of old regulative beliefs and the ruin of old ideals, recourse is had, whenever possible, to that amalgam of con- science and egoism, the sense of honor. In an era of individualism, whether in the Rome of the Stoics, the Italy of the Renais- sance, the England of the Restoration, the France of this
