organization and structure of typical groups,
but it should indicate the relation of this organization and structure
to those social problems that are actual and generally recognized. The
sort of facts which are now generally recognized as important in the
study, not merely of society, but the problems of society are:

a) Statistics: numbers, local distribution, mobility, incidence of
births, deaths, disease, and crime.

b) Institutions: local distribution, classification (i.e., (i)
industrial, (ii) religious, (iii) political, (iv) educational, (v)
welfare and mutual aid), communal organization.

c) Heritages: the customs and traditions transmitted by the group,
particularly in relation to religion, recreation and leisure time, and
social control (politics).

d) Organization of public opinion: parties, sects, cliques, and the
press.

4. _Social process and social progress._--Social process is the name for
all changes which can be regarded as changes in the life of the group. A
group may be said to have a life when it has a history. Among social
processes we may distinguish (a) the historical, (b) the cultural,
(c) the political, and (d) the economic.

a) We describe as historical the processes by which the fund of social
tradition, which is the heritage of every permanent social group, is
accumulated and transmitted from one generation to another.

History plays the role in the group of memory in the individual. Without
history social groups would, no doubt, rise and decline, but they would
neither grow old nor make progress.

Immigrants, crossing the ocean, leave behind them much of their local
traditions. The result is that they lose, particularly in the second
generation, that control which the family and group tradition formerly
exercised over them; but they are, for that very reason, all the more
open to the influence of the traditions and customs of their adopted
country.

b) If it is the function of the historical process to accumulate and
conserve the common fund of social experience, it is the function of the
cultural process to shape and define the social forms and the social
patterns which each preceding generation imposes upon its successors.

The individual living in society has to fit into a pre-existing
social world, to take part in the hedonistic, economic,
political, religious, moral, aesthetic, intellectual activities
of the group. For these activities the group has obj