246 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



territories. Small social aggregates are thus called into being, 

 the physical foundations of which are the common territory and 

 the relations which ensue from constant intercourse. These 

 simple aggregates, in their turn, combine and form aggregates 

 of greater complexity ; but each one maintains its personality, 

 so to speak, and constitutes the elementary segment of which 

 society as a whole is but an enlarged reproduction. In propor- 

 tion as this process of compounding and recompounding proceeds, 

 the bonds which bind the primitive aggregates to each other are 

 tightened ; the primitive aggregates gradually lose their per- 

 sonality, and become merged in the larger group of which they 

 form a part. In France this process of absorption and cen- 

 traKsation was carried to completion by the Revolution of 1789. 

 The ancien regime, by its policy of centralisation inaugurated by 

 Louis XI., had prepared the way for the Revolution ; but before 

 1789 the provinces still maintained much of their personaUty, 

 the soil of France was still divided against itself, and not all the 

 intermingling of populations which necessarily followed on the 

 development of roads and waterways had produced a complete 

 efecement of ancient feuds. The Revolution pushed the work 

 of levelling the provincial difierences to an extent unknown 

 before. The legal suppression of the ancient provinces, the 

 creation of a multitude of new departments, the development 

 of communication following on the invention of the steam-engiae, 

 have finally destroyed all traces of the old order of things, all 

 that remained of the personality of the original social aggregates. 

 In Germany the fusion of the heterogeneous principalities com- 

 posing Prussia into a single Prussian kingdom accomplished the 

 same work of centralisation as the Revolution accomplished in 

 France. The gradual absorption, first of Wales, then of Scot- 

 land, and finally of Ireland ; the fusion of all the provinces of 

 the Italian Peninsula under the Italian Crown ; and many other 

 cases which we have not space to mention here, are further 

 instances of this universal tendency of social evolution to destroy 



