158 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
monk, the artisan, the artist, and the civil servant were all 
more peripatetic than they are today. Their wanderings 
brought the different corners of the territory into contact 
with one another and contributed greatly to the unification. 
The political centralization could be maintained under 
such conditions only by an actual movement of the center 
by means of traveling civil servants. The journeys of the 
king or of the king’s judges and magistrates were for a long 
time the only means of overcoming the spatial dispersion 
of the group elements and of maintaining at least an ap- 
proximate political unity. 
An entirely different effect results if the wandering is 
done by elements whose life-principle is that of mobility 
while the life-principle of the group is that of territorial 
fixation. Such harmful effects result from the wandering 
of tramps and vagabonds who express in their spatial rela- 
tions their internal restlessness. Their wandering is an ex- 
pression of their nonconformity to the sedentary principle 
of the group, and serves forces which are antagonistic and 
dangerous to a harmonious unity.! 
Other Spatial Expressions of Sociological Forms 
The sociological interest in the phenomena so far re- 
ferred to arises only after the spatial configuration has 
fully appeared. In another set of phenomena the sociologi- 
cal importance lies mainly in the processes immediately 
preceding and in the sociological structure and energies 
determining the spatial configuration. To this group be- 
long the organization of groups on a territorial basis, the 
rule over territory as an expression of the rule over people, 
and certain sociological configurations which find expres- 
sion in a strip of intentionally depopulated land. 
i Soz., pp. 670-81.