FORTUNE AS A SOCIOLOGICAL FACTOR.

Social fortune the author hope adequately for present purposes as contact with conditions tending to bring to the particular social entity immediate success or failure that is more or less independent of and therefore does not correspond to its true character and quality. And the author would suggest that all such lack of correspondence tends in a general way to be made good by the subsequent course of events. Unequal, largely by reason of the element of good luck in its too easy and rapid success, to the difficulties and temptations of the situation that supervened thereon, it was rapidly crumbling away, gentes and plebs alike, while others, Roman in name and culture but by descent chiefly aliens from the conquered lands and even from the unconquered regions beyond, took over the vacant seats and the great inheritance. Respecting fortune as an element in world affairs, that its influence has perhaps been both overrated and misconceived through failure to take due account of subsequent reactions tending to neutralize its immediate results. The same holds, too, of all world-success or world-failure that may be considered so far fortunate or otherwise as being unrelated or only partially related to desert. For instance, a nation by unduly specializing in military matters may achieve military success on so considerable a scale as to place it in a position of supremacy in the international system to which it belongs.