nd groups make
the necessary internal adjustments to social situations which have been
created by competition and conflict. War and elections change
situations. When changes thus effected are decisive and are accepted,
conflict subsides and the tensions it created are resolved in the
process of accommodation into profound modifications of the competing
units, i.e., individuals and groups. A man once thoroughly defeated is,
as has often been noted, "never the same again." Conquest, subjugation,
and defeat are psychological as well as social processes. They establish
a new order by changing, not merely the status, but the attitudes of the
parties involved. Eventually the new order gets itself fixed in habit
and custom and is then transmitted as part of the established social
order to succeeding generations. Neither the physical nor the social
world is made to satisfy at once all the wishes of the natural man. The
rights of property, vested interests of every sort, the family
organization, slavery, caste and class, the whole social organization,
in fact, represent accommodations, that is to say, limitations of the
natural wishes of the individual. These socially inherited
accommodations have presumably grown up in the pains and struggles of
previous generations, but they have been transmitted to and accepted by
succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable social order.
All of these are forms of control in which competition is limited by
status.

Conflict is then to be identified with the political order and with
conscious control. Accommodation, on the other hand, is associated with
the social order that is fixed and established in custom and the mores.

Assimilation, as distinguished from accommodation, implies a more
thoroughgoing transformation of the personality--a transformation which
takes place gradually under the influence of social contacts of the most
concrete and intimate sort.

Accommodation may be regarded, like religious conversion, as a kind of
mutation. The wishes are the same but their organization is different.
Assimilation takes place not so much as a result of changes in the
organization as in the content, i.e., the memories, of the personality.
The individual units, as a result of intimate association,
interpenetrate, so to speak, and come in this way into possession of a
common experience and a common tradition. The permanence and solidarity
of the group rest finally upon this body of