THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 591 



houses alike, and in them are usually treated to music of a not abso- 

 lutely inferior quality. To say that good coffee is to be had at the 

 native coffeehouses is stating a truism, and a condition which proba- 

 bly few will venture to deny. Coffee is the soul of the land, and 

 its history a part of the history of the people themselves. 



THE KACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 

 A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. 



(Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896.) 

 By WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, Ph. D., 



ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ; LECTURER IN 

 ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. 



XIV.— URBAN PROBLEMS. 



THE extreme fluidity of our heterogeneous population is im- 

 pressed upon us by every phenomenon of social life here in 

 America. "We imagine the people of Europe, on the other hand, 

 after scores of generations of stable habitation, to have settled them- 

 selves permanently and contentedly into place. This is an entirely 

 erroneous assumption. As a matter of fact, they are almost as mobile 

 as our own American types. There are two ways in which demo- 

 graphic crystallization may have taken place. A people may have 

 become rigid horizontally, divided into castes, or social strata; 

 or it may be geographically segregated into localized communities, 

 varying in size all the way from the isolated hamlet to the highly 

 individualized nation. Both of these forms of crystallization are 

 breaking down to-day under the pressure of modern industrialism 

 .and democracy, in Europe as well as in America. Nor is it true that 

 the recency of our American social life has made the phenomena of 

 change more marked here than abroad. In fact, with the relics of 

 the old regime on every hand, the present tendencies in Europe are 

 the more startling of the two by reason of the immediate contrast. 

 Demographic processes are at work which promise mighty results 

 for the future. These are not cataclysmic, like the French Revolu- 

 tion; but being well-nigh universal, the fact that they are slow-mov- 

 ing should not blind us to their ultimate effects. Such movements 

 threaten to break up, not only the horizontal social stratification, 

 but the vertical geographical cleavage of locality and nationality 

 as well. Obviously any disturbance of these at once involves de- 

 struction of the racial individuality of the continent at the same 

 time. For this reason, many phases of social analysis appertain 



