Chapter V: Part I: The Evidence (4)

At the close of the school year in 1959, five full years after racial discrimination had been obliterated from the Washington schools, Dr. Hansen released some figures on how things were going. To the integrationist Washington _Post_, reporting happily on the data, things were going marvelously well: “District pupils’ performance on standardized tests this year topped last year’s scores in 15 of the 27 subjects tested, School Superintendent Carl F. Hansen reported yesterday.” The cheery tone of the _Post’s_ story was somewhat belied by the glum figures themselves. Washington’s sixth-graders had managed to achieve median scores in spelling, language, and arithmetical computation exactly matching--no more--the national norms for these three sixth-grade tests. Medians on the other twenty-four tests were below national norms, in some instances by as much as a full year. Ninth-graders who should have scored a median of 9.4 (ninth year, fourth month) in computation and paragraph meaning scored 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Dr. Hansen’s report on tests at the third-grade and fifth-grade levels has special interest:

_National _District Median Scores_
_Grade_ _Subject_ Norm_ _55-56_ _56-57_ _57-58_ _58-59_
3 Paragraph meaning 3.5 2.3 2.5 2.9 3.1
3 Word meaning 3.5 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.1
3 Spelling 3.5 2.5 3.0 3.1 3.2
3 Arith. reasoning 3.5 2.4 2.8 2.8 3.2
3 Arith. computation 3.5 2.6 2.7 2.9 3.2
5 Paragraph meaning 5.1 3.8 4.1 4.3 4.2
5 Word meaning 5.1 4.1 4.5 4.6 4.4
5 Language 5.1 4.2 4.5 4.6 4.4
5 Spelling 5.1 4.2 4.3 4.8 4.5
5 Arith. reasoning 5.1 4.2 4.5 4.6 4.5
5 Arith. computation 5.1 3.9 4.1 4.6 4.1

It should not escape notice that the Washington children whose median scores are shown in the foregoing table never had known a day of legally segregated schooling. The Negro pupils here tested never had suffered the school discrimination likely to affect their hearts and minds in a fashion never to be undone. These pupils, on the contrary, had had the benefit of all the special attention that could be given them by a school administration frantically eager to demonstrate the glories of integration. No resource of guidance and special teaching, no visual aid or teaching technique had been denied them. Yet there are the scores: Not a single test in Washington’s third and fifth grades produced a median equal to the national norm. The fifth-graders, backsliding, did not even equal fifth-grade scores the preceding year.

It is perhaps needless to dwell further upon the findings of intelligence and achievement tests beyond commenting briefly upon some of the flimsy efforts the equalitarians make to discredit them. One objection is that the Negro child has no “motivation” to do well on them; but at the younger age levels especially, this is pure conjecture. It also is complained that frequently the tests are administered to Negro children by white examiners, and that an essential rapport thereby is denied them; but this was not true of the tests in Washington, and it has not been true of many other investigations. The most frequent objection is that tests tend to compare white and colored children of unequal social and economic background; but abundant evidence is available of investigations in which subjects have been “paired” by every imaginable criterion, and almost without exception these tests show the same lamentable contrasts in white and Negro scores.

Otto Klineberg has attempted to dismiss all the findings: “Until and unless the _same_ education is given to both races, comparisons will be unfair.” But it manifestly is impossible to give the _same_ education to any two groups. All that one can do is to provide the same textbooks, the same teaching aids, teachers with the same degree of education, and physical facilities generally comparable--but even then, identity of total educational opportunity could not possibly be achieved. The various tests now being administered in school systems across the country are as fair and objective as competent psychologists and educators can make them; and the bleak, undeniable fact, confirmed repeatedly in school districts both North and South, is that colored children regularly score at lower levels than the white children of their communities. Thoughtful students of the difficult problem before the South will comprehend what the evidence means in terms of the real and practical obstacles to welding together white and Negro schools in rural areas below the Potomac.

Other very real difficulties merit reflection also. The disputations of social scientists cannot be considered in a vacuum, nor the findings of achievement tests treated as so many punched cards for an IBM machine. These are _children_ we are concerned with, white and Negro alike, and the fact is (I do not argue the goodness or badness of the fact; I merely cite its existence) that white and Negro children in the South have many quite different educational requirements. The essentially dual and separate society of the South cannot be dissolved overnight by court decree. For years to come in the South, the practice of law and medicine, the handling of banking and finance, the sale of stocks and bonds, the management of large retail and wholesale enterprises, and the administration of commerce and government will continue to be overwhelmingly restricted to white persons. This is not to say that many able Negroes are not engaged in these fields now; they are, and their number is increasing, but they are conspicuous exceptions. In rural areas especially, where professional and business opportunities naturally are severely limited, the realities of adult opportunity are even more striking.

All this has to be considered practically in terms of curriculum planning, guidance, teaching emphasis, and the like. Nothing very significant is accomplished, really, in offering physics or calculus to rural Negro boys who intend to drop out at the ninth-grade level and go to work farming or cutting pulpwood. Negro girls who realistically expect to find employment in a tobacco stemmery, a laundry, a bakery, or in domestic service have educational requirements materially different from those of their white counterparts. The impatient theoretician, unwilling even to attempt to understand a social order he so thoroughly disapproves, doubtless will be repelled by this line of reasoning. But the reasoning has a way of making sense in rural county seats.

A point is made of the exceptional Negro students. What of them? Why should a brilliant and ambitious colored youngster be held back by the relative ineptitude of his typical colored classmates? My answer is that he should not be held back, and I believe that in the course of time, this will be the answer of the South as a whole. When colored students appear who demonstrate the intellectual ability to compete at top levels with their white counterparts, I am wholly agreeable to any plan that would bring them, by transfer, to the finest high schools for miles around. Virginia has just such a program slowly formulating in its plan of “Freedom of Choice.” But I would suggest that one consequence of such transfers of exceptional children, in the foreseeable future, would be to deny the slower Negro pupils the example and stimulation of superior students of their own race. The tendency would be further to reduce the achievement levels of the colored schools as such. But I would leave such decisions to the pupils and their parents themselves.

I have attempted to set forth two practical objections to school desegregation in the South, and especially in the rural South--first, the demonstrably lower levels of aptitude and achievement on the Negro’s part, and second, the demonstrably different opportunities and occupations for which most colored pupils realistically must prepare themselves. A third difficulty involves the teaching staffs. The massive desegregation of Southern schools predictably would have a catastrophic effect upon the thousands of Negro men and women who now enjoy, within their race, relatively high status and relatively good incomes as public school teachers. In many areas of the South, as I have said, attitudes are changing and softening, as white parents discover there is a level of token desegregation that is not intolerable to them. This tendency, I feel certain, will increase year by year. But I cannot yet foresee the day, in the greatest part of the South, when white parents by and large will accept Negro teachers and Negro principals over their children. This would demand one more subtle and unwelcome shifting of gears; it would carry the social revolution beyond the point of an uneasy “equality” of pupils in a classroom, and would make the white child subject to Negro masters. The efforts of a Federal court to compel employment of Negro teachers who would preside over heavily “mixed” classrooms would be bitterly resented, and the resentment would manifest itself in wholesale withdrawals and school abandonments. I venture the flat prediction, on the basis of personal conversations with white families who have moved out of Washington, that this difficulty would be seen as a last-straw condition. But the alternative to the employment of Negro teachers in massively desegregated schools is to discharge the Negro teachers and to replace them with white teachers. This would be cruelly unfair; but in any unhappy election between preserving the jobs of some Negro schoolteachers and preserving a local school system itself (which involves preservation of the good will of white parents and taxpayers), the jobs will go.

This line of discussion brings us to a fourth practical difficulty that would accompany massive desegregation in the South: the predictable difficulty in employing _white_ teachers for racially mixed classrooms. New York, Philadelphia, and Washington have run into this constantly. Dr. Hansen has disclosed in the _Teachers’ College Record_ (October 1960) that Washington’s school system employed 579 temporary teachers in 1954-55. By 1959-60, this number had grown to 1250. “It is difficult,” he concedes, “to find white teachers psychologically prepared to take jobs in predominantly Negro schools, with the result that the source of applicants tends to become more and more restricted.” And if Washington has this problem, with the high salaries and fringe benefits and physical facilities and cultural amenities it can offer a prospective teacher, what may we reasonably expect at the branch-heads?

One of the problems in this area, acknowledged even by Otto Klineberg, is the language barrier that so often baffles a white teacher in attempting to communicate effectively with a Negro child. “Obviously the Southern Negro speaks English,” says Klineberg in _Characteristics of the American Negro_, “but equally obviously, his English is not similar to, or the equal of, the English spoken by the average white.” Many other observers have made the same point. The Negro inflection, pronunciation, word-choice, and accent are quite different; and in the case of the South Carolina gullah, these characteristics make speech almost incomprehensible. White teachers, with jobs widely available to them, simply would rather not get involved in this.

These teachers have other objections, too. As the record of hearings before a House subcommittee in 1956 makes vividly clear, many white teachers are simply appalled by the sexual mores and the violent attitudes of some of the Negro pupils in desegregated schools. One witness after another appeared before the committee to testify to the inordinate amount of time that had to be spent simply in maintaining discipline. Adolescent sex urges, volatile enough under any circumstances, are further complicated by the novelties and tensions of intimate interracial association in halls and classrooms and toilets. Philadelphians still recall grimly the incident at Shaw Junior High School in 1956, when a Negro gang gathered outside the school to insult and annoy pupils as they left the building. Three teachers who came out to remonstrate were attacked and severely beaten. The white principal of another Philadelphia school, who had watched the deterioration of his school from an “honors” institution of high scholarship into a second-rate vocational factory, was quoted in _U. S. News_ in 1958: “Many of these youngsters are not adequately motivated for learning. They have no home to speak of, nothing to encourage them once they leave the school grounds. They’re here simply to occupy their time until they’re old enough to go out and get a job--if they can find a job.”

These are among the arguments of practicality the Southerner would advance against compulsory desegregation of his public schools. He is not prepared to chop logic, or to engage in casuistic debate on the why of the world that he lives in. He knows that with the best will in the world--and in his fashion, he more often than not has great good will for the Negroes of his community--he cannot quickly elevate the Negro’s home environment appreciably. Overnight he cannot put books and magazines in Negro living rooms; he cannot inject generations of cultural background with some magic hypodermic needle; he cannot deliver to the Negro, as he would loan him a hoe or give him an overcoat, the social graces, the community of experience, the heritage of generations, the accumulation of business, professional, and civic understanding that necessarily must figure in the educative process. Time presses, and the school bell rings, and on April mornings the honk of the school bus, like the voice of the turtle, is abroad in the land. He has to do what he conceives to be best for his child _now_, to prepare that child for the society he predictably will live in tomorrow. And he does not accept the idea that racially mixed classrooms, over a long period of years, in the context of the only society he knows, will provide a workable, desirable, or pleasant experience for sons and daughters who are dear to him. Maybe, he says doubtfully, maybe some time in the future....

IX

If there ever is to be in the South any significant degree of desegregation in public institutions, let alone any significant degree of integration in society as a whole, it can come effectively in one way only: slowly, cautiously, voluntarily, “some time in the future.” This is the doctrine of “gradualism,” and the Negro’s professional leaders despise it. They insist, with some plausibility, that constitutional rights are personal and immediate rights, capable of being lost irretrievably if they are not exercised at once; and now that new constitutional rights have been created and defined, they ask, why is the realization of these rights coming so slowly? “How long do you expect us to wait?” they demand. “It is almost a hundred years since slavery now.” They do not want to be gradual; they want to be integrated.

To these impatient appeals, the South makes a number of responses, none of them pleasing to the militant Negro leadership. But the responses make sense nonetheless. The answers add up to this: The Negro is plunging forward now in a movement that is at once both revolutionary and evolutionary. All of man’s history suggests that while revolutionary changes may be hurried and pushed along by processes of forced growth, the changes that result from evolution can never be hurried at all. They will come at their own speed, and their own speed is glacial.

In many areas, the revolution proceeds apace. William G. Carleton, of the University of Florida at Gainesville, acknowledges “great strides” by the Southern Negro since World War II. In 1944, Negroes were virtually barred from participation in Southern politics. In 1960, when he reported in the _Teachers’ College Record_ that Negro rights were making haste slowly, 1,100,000 Negroes were registered to vote in Southern primaries and general elections. The number is considerably higher in 1962, and the United States Civil Rights Commission has conceded that except in a relatively few Black Belt localities in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, Negroes now are not prevented from registering or voting over most of the South. In most areas, it is no longer the intimidation of the white man, but far more often the indolence, indifference, and incapacity of the Negro himself that keeps him from the polls. In some Southern States, Negro registration has climbed to 35 or 40 per cent of the adult Negro population; white registration, in many communities, is seldom much more than half or two-thirds of the adult population. In Florida, Negro registration increased from 8000 in 1944 to 160,000 in 1960. North Carolina and Virginia have witnessed gains almost as notable. To Carleton, a “veritable revolution” is seen in the South: “Had the mass of Southerners in 1950 been told that by 1960 there would be considerable token desegregation in the schools of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas; even more desegregation on city bus lines; and that segregation at lunch counters and eating places would be here and there giving way in the South, they would have refused flatly to believe it. From the point of view of social justice, the changes have been painfully slow and spotty; but from the point of view of white Southern cultural attitudes, the changes have been unbelievably swift.”

Note that the unbelievable changes of which Carleton speaks are changes from “segregation” to “desegregation,” in his own careful choice of nouns, and not changes from “segregation” to “integration.” It takes no great powers of prophecy to envision a great many other such changes, as the South cautiously explores the possibilities of retaining its segregation while abandoning it too. I write in a period of transition. Ten years hence, in 1972, the perfect clarity of hindsight will perceive much that is now obscure; but my impression is that some sort of peak has been reached by the white South with the crisis over the parks of Birmingham. In the winter of 1961-62, a decision was reached by officials to close the Birmingham parks rather than to accept a policy of permitting their joint use by the two races, but the decision brought the first audible rumblings of misgiving and disagreement in a city that previously had been united in opposition to the slightest retreat from policies of total municipal segregation. A great many persons in Birmingham, sincerely convinced of the wisdom of essential racial separation, also were sincerely convinced of the desirability of retaining the parks on a functioning basis. They were aware that other Southern cities of comparable urbanity and custom had adjusted to a system of open parks. They did not like the idea of a parkless city; and they began actively to think about all this.

To the devout believers in racial integration, it doubtless appears incredible that Birmingham’s action could have been taken in the first place, or that the wrongness of this decision (in their eyes) should fail to be instantly apparent. These impatient critics simply do not comprehend the depth of Southern feelings; they are as totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the typical white Southerner as the typical white Southerner is totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the Negro. In the course of time, each of these conflicting viewpoints will be seen more clearly; and once seen, may be understood and dealt with. But the process demands time, time, and more time. The death of racial segregation, which the integrationists see as a necessary end, will follow Caesar’s prescription: It will come when it will come.

To any objective observer, it should be manifest that such a time is not yet--not in the early 1960s. In one city after another, North as well as South, the plain and palpable fact is that where “integration” is pushed too rapidly--more rapidly, that is, than the Negro community is prepared to sustain it or the white community is prepared to accept it--a reverse action has set in. The District of Columbia offers a textbook example: Its public schools passed in eight years from segregation to desegregation to a virtual resegregation, as white families fled from mixed neighborhoods and mixed schools. St. Louis has acknowledged the same experience: William A. Kottmeyer, deputy superintendent of instruction in St. Louis, told the National Conference of Editorial Writers in October 1961 that St. Louis then had more actual segregation in its schools than had existed prior to the _Brown_ decision. Of 130 elementary schools in St. Louis at the time, only 36 were classified as mixed; 46 were all white, and 48 all Negro. Nowhere in the South has school desegregation been attempted under more favorable auspices than in Louisville, yet in 1961-62 the trend back toward resegregation was appearing there, too. Between 1950 and 1960, Baltimore experienced a net out-migration of 175,000 white persons, and a net in-migration of 41,000 nonwhite persons. Dr. Houston R. Jackson, a Negro assistant superintendent of Baltimore schools, said in the summer of 1961 that Baltimore had more all-Negro schools at that time than it had before desegregation began in the fall of 1954: “When the Negroes in a school reach 50 per cent,” he added, “that’s when the white teachers begin to ask for transfers.” And to judge from accounts of school litigation in such Northern localities as New Rochelle, N. Y., and Englewood, N. J., the antipathy of white persons to intimate and personal relationships with Negro persons is not a wholly Southern phenomenon. One satirical lexicographer, observing conditions in Chicago, has defined integration as “the period which elapses between the arrival of the first Negro and the departure of the last white.” Manifestly, the resistance to a coerced racial “equality” is wide and deep.

Why is this so? The answer, in blunt speech, is that the Negro race, as a race, has not earned equality. And as I have attempted to argue earlier, it is a feeble and evasive response to accuse the white critic, in making that flat statement, of emulating the child who shot his parents and then pleaded for mercy as an orphan. The failure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieve equality cannot be blamed wholly on white oppression. This is the excuse, the crutch, the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable or unwilling to face reality. In other times and other places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own destiny; they have _compelled_ acceptance on their own merit; they have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this. “We do not _want_ to be second-class citizens,” cries James Farmer, national director of the Congress for Racial Equality. But “wanting” is not enough. It is a beginning; but it is no more than a beginning.

How is the Negro race, as a race, to earn the respect of the white race as a race? I should imagine that a cultivation of self-respect would offer an excellent starting place; and I do not see much of this now. With a few notable exceptions, most Negro spokesmen appear to spend their time condoning and minimizing the characteristics that deprive their race of a “first-class” reputation. Are Negro neighborhoods filthy? The Negro, it is said, has no incentive to clean them up. Why does this appalling rate of illegitimacy persist? The Negro, it is said, must relieve the frustrations brought on by segregation. Are Negro incomes generally low? It is all the fault of the white man: He deprives the Negro of job opportunities.

After so long a time, these repeated alibis grow stale. I have an idea that some Negro defenders themselves have ceased to believe in them. And I cherish the further idea that a really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, “Why are we treated as second-class citizens?” and return a candid answer to it: “Because all too often that is what we are.”

If the Negro people have the innate capacity that Montagu, Clark, Comas, Boas and the others insist they have, the Negro people in time will overcome every obstacle that fate has put in their way. On their own initiative, as a product of their own industry and skill, they will develop the talents that command respect in the market place. They will provide their own capital, build their own enterprises, sell their own wares, compete among themselves until they have learned to compete in the whole wide world. They will exert, within their own community, the moral leadership necessary to reduce crime and illegitimacy. By participation first in their own constructive public affairs they will prove themselves capable of contributing actively to the civic, social, and economic life of their counties, towns, and cities. They will stop trying simply to imitate the white man; they will discover themselves first, and if this inner self is all that the liberal anthropologists assert it to be, the discovery should lead to wondrous exploitation. _Ebony_ magazine made this same point editorially in 1959, when it urged its readers to stop complaining about being referred to as “Negro” or as “colored”: “The real problem is the man called Negro. If he would spend as much time dignifying his race as he does decrying its designation, if he would quit worrying about the label and concentrate upon improving the product, the stuff inside, the name would take care of itself.”

This was sound advice, and one of the hopeful aspects of the South in the early 1960s (there are not many) is that a new generation of young Negroes may even act upon it. Carleton remarks in his essay upon the increasing nationalization of the Southern Negro, who now, more often than not, has some Northern connections; and he says this:

“Not only has the Southern Negro been nationalized, he has also developed his own propertied and business classes, his own wealthy and middle classes. Every Southern city of any size has a group of economically comfortable and relatively independent lawyers, doctors, teachers, morticians, contractors, insurance agents, and owners of small businesses--garages and filling stations, restaurants, taverns, barber shops, beauty parlors, stores, and so forth. These people have education or considerable economic independence, or both.”

In my own observation, this is quite true; the notable fact, as yet unrecognized by many staunch Southern segregationists, is that a new Negro is in fact emerging--the bright young high school senior, the serious college student, the impatient middle-class Negro couple, struggling for respectability and status. Their impact is yet to be wholly felt within their own race, but it is being felt increasingly upon white institutions; and as a consequence, as Carleton observes, racial attitudes among white persons in certain parts of the South _are_ subtly changing. He terms this a “softening.” It is sometimes a hardening, too, as white families, having long cherished an affection for “their” Negroes, discover that their charges prefer not to be known as Uncle Toms or Aunt Jemimas; the disillusioned reaction, out of chagrin and embarrassment, is to let them bail themselves out of trouble, if that’s the way they want it. The relationship changes. But if the Southern Negro is to find salvation at all, he must find it in this trend to independence and maturity. “The most important immediate force at work to emancipate the Negro of the South,” says Carleton, “is the Southern Negro himself. A great change has come over him. He is no longer an Uncle Tom, or even the kind of Negro approved of by Booker T. Washington. He now talks back. He has a new self-respect, a new confidence, a new independence. Increasingly he is depending less on Northern Negro initiative and leadership and is supplying his own.” To the extent that this prophecy is fulfilled--for all the bitter incidents, severances, and failures that may be expected--the upward and forward motion of the Negro will be recorded.

“The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” The brooding, introspective advice of Cassius ought not to be spurned; it ought rather to be put to thoughtful use by those genuinely (as distinguished from merely politically) concerned with the Negroes’ movement out of an underling’s status. James B. Conant has recognized this, however belatedly, in his _Slums and Suburbs_. Here Dr. Conant paints a grimly realistic picture of a Negro child’s life in the urban slums of the North, where the child may live six flights up in a tenement offering “one filthy room with a bed, a light bulb, and a stink.” It is after visiting such tenements, and inspecting the schools attended by slum children, that he grows impatient “with both critics and defenders of public education who ignore the realities of school situations to engage in fruitless debate about educational philosophy, purposes, and the like: These situations call for action, not for hair-splitting arguments.”

Dr. Conant is a distinguished spokesman for liberalism, but unlike most of his fastidious brethren, he came to the slums, and smelled them, and began to see realities fair and clear. What he has to say about Negro education merits a sober hearing. He is convinced that it is wrong to insist upon a curriculum completely unsuited to the needs of the children required to take it: “Foreign languages in Grade 7 or algebra in Grade 8 ... have little place in a school in which half the pupils in that grade read at the fourth-grade level or below. Homework has little relevance in a situation where home is a filthy, noisy tenement.” By the same token, it may be suggested that in the rural South, school offerings ought to be adapted to real life also; and though Dr. Conant is a staunch opponent of school segregation as such--that is, to the assignment of pupils to schools solely by reason of their race--he sees no reason why satisfactory education cannot be provided in all Negro schools. Arbitrarily to shift children around, simply to satisfy sociological theories of an ideal race-mixture, impressed Dr. Conant as wrong. This approach treats children “as though they were pawns on a chessboard.”

But these children, white and black, are not mere pawns on a chessboard, and whatever the sins or submissions of their great-grandfathers may have been, they merit consideration in their own right. In the South, this consideration steadily is being extended. If we of the South cannot turn the clock back to 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, at least we can strive to turn the clock back to 1896, when the doctrine of separate but equal school facilities received a sort of casual endorsement from a Supreme Court concerned primarily with a question of public transportation. True, the apostles of the Brave New World will denounce the idea of applying the constitutional principles of 1896 to problems of the early 1960s, but there have been entirely too many such denunciations from thoughtless and ill-informed pedagogues. The Negro (precisely as the white) is entitled, so far as a system of education is concerned, to the same educational opportunities afforded his white counterpart, and neither more nor less. What he does with these educational opportunities thereafter is his question to answer.

I do not profess to know what the future holds for the Southern Negro, or for that matter, for the Northern Negro. The achievements of the colored people of the 1950s merit at least provisional applause: They are fighting their way out of millennial shadows--and more power to them! If an arriving generation of Negro children can sustain this momentum, the race should move ahead, first within itself, as Dr. Conant pleads, and in time--_in time_--toward equality with the larger and more established community around it. When that hour of equality arrives--whenever that hour arrives--white “prejudices” predictably will dissolve; there no longer would be a basis for them. What comes thereafter I cannot suggest, but it is reasonable to surmise that barriers once lowered will not thereafter be raised capriciously again. When the Negro race proves itself, in terms of Western values of maturity and achievement, it will be time enough to talk of complete social and economic integration. Until then, it is pointless to argue sociology; it is more useful, in every way, to meditate upon the transcendent issues of the law.