nd no
commodity escapes from the speculating rage. It is not tulip speculation
this time, but speculations in cottons, real estate, banks, and
railways."
One characteristic of the stranger's activity, be he a settler in a new
or an old land, follows of necessity. I refer to the determination to
apply the utmost rational effort in the field of economic and technical
activity. The stranger must carry through plans with success because of
necessity or because he cannot withstand the desire to secure his
future. On the other hand, he is able to do it more easily than other
folk because he is not hampered by tradition. This explains clearly
enough why alien immigrants, as we have seen, furthered commercial and
industrial progress wherever they came. Similarly we may thus account
for the well-known fact that nowhere are technical inventions so
plentiful as in America, that railway construction and the making of
machinery proceed much more rapidly there than anywhere else in the
world. It all comes from the peculiar conditions of the problem,
conditions that have been termed colonial--great distances, dear labor,
and the will to progress. The state of mind that will have, nay, must
have, progress is that of the stranger, untrammeled by the past and
gazing toward the future.
Yet results such as these are not achieved by strangers merely because
they happen to be strangers. Place a negro in a new environment; will he
build railways and invent labor-saving machines? Hardly. There must be a
certain fitness; it must be in the blood. In short, other forces beside
that of being merely a stranger in a strange land are bound to
co-operate before the total result can be fully accounted for. There
must be a process of selection, making the best types available, and
the ethical and moral factor, too, counts for much. Nevertheless, the
migrations themselves were a very powerful element in the growth of
capitalism.
5. The Sociological Significance of the "Stranger"[132]
If wandering, considered as the liberation from every given point in
space, is the conceptual opposite to fixation at such a point, then
surely the sociological form of "the stranger" presents the union of
both of these specifications. It discloses, indeed, the fact that
relations to space are only, on the one hand, the condition, and, on the
other hand, the symbol, of relations to men. The stranger is not taken
here, therefore, in the sense frequently employed, o
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