This is his “social law of nature,” which he compares to the law of gravitation in its certainty. War is therefore necessary for civilized as for primitive societies, and any talk of ideals or of peace is but self-deception, if it be not deliberate masking of warlike intentions. The race theory of Gobineau has gone on until it is one of the important factors in American group oppositions today. And surprisingly enough, the conflict theory of Gumplowitz comes back also from time to time. In “Survival or Extinction,” a new work by Elisha M. Friedman, I find this sentence: [47]“The absorption of a scattered minority people is the inexorable law of History. Can the Jews hope to escape it?” This on the basis of Gumplowitz, whose treatment of the Jewish problem is very different; he criticized the Jews bitterly for being the one exception to his “inexorable law,” and said they should have obeyed it and been absorbed among the nations, as were the Phoenicians two thousand years ago. Certainly there is group struggle; it is a natural tendency when two different groups come into contact; and it is a gross and obvious phenomenon which nobody can help noticing. But at the same time there goes on also a subtler but equally significant movement of group imitation. The white settlers fought the Indians in a way that everybody knew; many have missed the adoption by the whites of maize and tobacco, names of rivers and sites of cities; by the Indians of the horse, the rifle and the religion of the conquerors. Rome conquered Greece in war, and Rome imitated Greece in art and literature. Israel conquered Canaan and imposed the one God, destroying the high places where the earlier inhabitants had worshipped the powers of fertility in nature; but Israel incorporated the harvest festivals of the Canaanites into its own shepherd and nomad ritual. Group imitation takes its place beside group competition in the spread of culture elements about the earth, in the study of foreign languages and literature, in missionary effort, in the adoption of new inventions for warfare or for industry. These are as important and as omnipresent as business competitions or territorial rivalry, far more common than war.