Until recently the most famous historical use of the term propaganda made it synonymous with foreign missions. It was Pope Gregory XV who almost exactly three centuries ago, after many years of preparation, finally founded the great Propaganda College to care for the interests of the church in non-Catholic countries. With its centuries of experience this is probably the most efficient organization for propaganda in the world. Probably most apologetics is propaganda. No religion and no age has been entirely free from it.

One of the classical psychoanalytic case histories is that of Breuer's water glass and the puppy dog. A young lady patient was utterly unable to drink water from a glass. It was a deep embarrassment. Even under the stress of great thirst in warm weather and the earnest effort to break up a foolish phobia, the glass might be taken and raised, but it couldn't be drunk from. Psychoanalysis disclosed the following facts. Underlying this particular phobia was an intense antipathy to dogs. The young lady's roommate had been discovered giving a dog a drink from the common drinking-glass. The antipathy to the dog was simply transferred to the glass.

The case is a commonplace in the annals of hysteria. But let us examine the mechanism. Suppose that I had wanted to keep that drinking-glass for my own personal use. A perfectly simple and effective expedient it would have been in the absence of other good motives to capitalize that antipathy by allowing her to see the dog drink out of the glass. The case would then have been a perfect case of propaganda. All propaganda is capitalized prejudice. It rests on some emotional premise which is the motive force of the process. The emotional transfer is worked by some associative process like similarity, use, or the causal relationship. The derived sympathetic antipathy represents the goal.

The great self-preservative, social, and racial instincts will always furnish the main reservoir of motive forces at the service of propaganda. They will have the widest and the most insistent appeal. Only second to these in importance are the peculiar racial tendencies and historical traditions that represent the genius of a civilization. The racial-superiority consciousness of the Germans operated as a never-ending motive for their "Aushalten" propaganda. We Americans have a notable cultural premise in our consideration for the underdog. Few things outside our consciousness of family will arouse us as surely and as universally as this modification of the protective instinct.

In addition to the group tendencies that arise from a community of experience, individual propaganda may use every phase of individual experience, individual bias and prejudice. I am told that first-class salesmen not infrequently keep family histories of their customers, producing a favorable attitude toward their merchandise by way of an apparent personal interest in the children. Apparently any group of ideas with an emotional valence may become the basis for propaganda.

There are three limitations to the processes of propaganda. The first is emotional recoil, the second is the exhaustion of available motive force, the third is the development of internal resistance or negativism.

The most familiar of the three is emotional recoil. We know only too well what will happen if we tell a boy all the things that he likes to do are "bad," while all the things that he dislikes are "good." Up to a certain point the emotional value of bad and good respectively will be transferred to the acts as we intend. But each transfer has an emotional recoil on the concepts good and bad. At the end a most surprising thing may happen. The moral values may get reversed in the boy's mind. Bad may come to represent the sum total of the satisfactory and desirable, while good may represent the sum total of the unsatisfactory and the undesirable. To the pained adult such a consequence is utterly inexplicable, only because he fails to realize that all mental products are developments. There is always a kind of reciprocity in emotional transfer. The value of the modified factor recoils to the modifying factor.

The whole mechanism of the transfer and of the recoil may best be expressed in terms of the conditioned reflex of Pavlov. The flow of saliva in a dog is a natural consequence to the sight and smell of food. If concurrently with the smelling of food the dog is pinched, the pinch ceases to be a matter for resentment. By a process of emotional transfer, on being pinched the dog may show the lively delight that belongs to the sight and smell of food. Even the salivary secretions may be started by the transfigured pinch. It was the great operating physiologist Sherrington who exclaimed after a visit to Pavlov that at last he understood the psychology of the martyrs. But it is possible so to load the smell of food with pain and damage that its positive value breaks down. Eating-values may succumb to the pain values instead of the pain to the eating-values. This is the prototype of the concept bad when it gets overloaded with the emotional value of the intrinsically desirable. The law of recoil seems to be a mental analogue of the physical law that action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions.

The second limitation to propaganda occurs when the reciprocal effects of transfer exhaust the available motive forces of a mind. Propaganda certainly weakens the forces that are appealed to too often. We are living just now in a world of weakened appeals. Many of the great human motives were exploited to the limit during the war. It is harder to raise money now than it was, harder to find motives for giving that are still effective. One of my former colleagues once surprised and shocked me by replying to some perfectly good propaganda in which I tried to tell him that certain action was in the line of duty, to the effect that he was tired of being told that something was his duty, and that he was resolved not to do another thing because it was his duty. There seems to be evidence that in some quarters, at least, patriotism, philanthropy, and civic duty have been exploited as far as the present systems will carry. It is possible to exhaust our floating capital of social-motive forces. When that occurs we face a kind of moral bankruptcy.

A final stage of resistance is reached when propaganda develops a negativistic defensive reaction. To develop such negativisms is always the aim of counterpropaganda. It calls the opposed propaganda, prejudiced, half-truth, or, as the Germans did, "Lies, All Lies." There is evidence that the moral collapse of Germany under the fire of our paper bullets came with the conviction that they had been systematically deceived by their own propagandists.

There are two great social dangers in propaganda. Great power in irresponsible hands is always a social menace. We have some legal safeguards against careless use of high-powered physical explosives. Against the greater danger of destructive propaganda there seems to be little protection without imperiling the sacred principles of free speech.

The second social danger is the tendency to overload and level down every great human incentive in the pursuit of relatively trivial ends. To become blase is the inevitable penalty of emotional exploitation. I believe there may well be grave penalties in store for the reckless commercialized exploitation of human emotions in the cheap sentimentalism of our moving pictures. But there are even graver penalties in store for the generation that permits itself to grow morally blase. One of our social desiderata, it seems to me, is the protection of the great springs of human action from destructive exploitation for selfish, commercial, or other trivial ends.

The slow constructive process of building moral credits by systematic education lacks the picturesqueness of propaganda. It also lacks its quick results. But just as the short cut of hypnotism proved a dangerous substitute for moral training, so I believe we shall find that not only is moral education a necessary precondition for effective propaganda, but that in the end it is a safer and incomparably more reliable social instrument.

C. INSTITUTIONS

1. Institutions and the Mores[273]

Institutions and laws are produced out of mores. An institution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine, interest) and a structure. The structure is a framework, or apparatus, or perhaps only a number of functionaries set to co-operate in prescribed ways at a certain conjuncture. The structure holds the concept and furnishes instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of facts and action in a way to serve the interests of men in society. Institutions are either crescive or enacted. They are crescive when they take shape in the mores, growing by the instinctive efforts by which the mores are produced. Then the efforts, through long use, become definite and specific.

Property, marriage, and religion are the most primary institutions. They began in folkways. They became customs. They developed into mores by the addition of some philosophy of welfare, however crude. Then they were made more definite and specific as regards the rules, the prescribed acts, and the apparatus to be employed. This produced a structure and the institution was complete. Enacted institutions are products of rational invention and intention. They belong to high civilization. Banks are institutions of credit founded on usages which can be traced back to barbarism. There came a time when, guided by rational reflection on experience, men systematized and regulated the usages which had become current, and thus created positive institutions of credit, defined by law and sanctioned by the force of the state. Pure enacted institutions which are strong and prosperous are hard to find. It is too difficult to invent and create an institution, for a purpose, out of nothing. The electoral college in the Constitution of the United States is an example. In that case the democratic mores of the people have seized upon the device and made of it something quite different from what the inventors planned. All institutions have come out of mores, although the rational element in them is sometimes so large that their origin in the mores is not to be ascertained except by a historical investigation (legislatures, courts, juries, joint-stock companies, the stock exchange). Property, marriage, and religion are still almost entirely in the mores. Amongst nature men any man might capture and hold a woman at any time, if he could. He did it by superior force which was its own supreme justification. But his act brought his group and her group into war, and produced harm to his comrades. They forbade capture, or set conditions for it. Beyond the limits, the individual might still use force, but his comrades were no longer responsible. The glory to him, if he succeeded, might be all the greater. His control over his captive was absolute. Within the prescribed conditions, "capture" became technical and institutional, and rights grew out of it. The woman had a status which was defined by custom, and was very different from the status of a real captive. Marriage was the institutional relation, in the society and under its sanction, of a woman to a man, where the woman had been obtained in the prescribed way. She was then a "wife." What her rights and duties were was defined by the mores, as they are today in all civilized society.

Acts of legislation come out of the mores. In low civilization all societal regulations are customs and taboos, the origin of which is unknown. Positive laws are impossible until the stage of verification, reflection, and criticism is reached. Until that point is reached there is only customary law, or common law. The customary law may be codified and systematized with respect to some philosophical principles, and yet remain customary. The codes of Manu and Justinian are examples. Enactment is not possible until reverence for ancestors has been so much weakened that it is no longer thought wrong to interfere with traditional customs by positive enactment. Even then there is reluctance to make enactments, and there is a stage of transition during which traditional customs are extended by interpretation to cover new cases and to prevent evils. Legislation, however, has to seek standing ground on the existing mores, and it soon becomes apparent that legislation, to be strong, must be consistent with the mores. Things which have been in the mores are put under police regulation and later under positive law. It is sometimes said that "public opinion" must ratify and approve police regulations, but this statement rests on an imperfect analysis. The regulations must conform to the mores, so that the public will not think them too lax or too strict. The mores of our urban and rural populations are not the same; consequently legislation about intoxicants which is made by one of these sections of the population does not succeed when applied to the other. The regulation of drinking-places, gambling-places, and disorderly houses has passed through the above-mentioned stages. It is always a question of expediency whether to leave a subject under the mores, or to make a police regulation for it, or to put it into the criminal law. Betting, horse racing, dangerous sports, electric cars, and vehicles are cases now of things which seem to be passing under positive enactment and out of the unformulated control of the mores. When an enactment is made there is a sacrifice of the elasticity and automatic self-adaptation of custom, but an enactment is specific and is provided with sanctions. Enactments come into use when conscious purposes are formed, and it is believed that specific devices can be framed by which to realize such purposes in the society. Then also prohibitions take the place of taboos, and punishments are planned to be deterrent rather than revengeful. The mores of different societies, or of different ages, are characterized by greater of less readiness and confidence in regard to the use of positive enactments for the realization of societal purposes.

2. Common Law and Statute Law[274]

It probably would have surprised the early Englishman if he had been told that either he or anybody else did not know the law—still more that there was ever any need for any parliament or assembly to tell him what it was. They all knew the law, and they all knew that they knew the law, and the law was a thing that they knew as naturally as they knew fishing and hunting. They had grown up into it. It never occurred to them as an outside thing.

So it has been found that where you take children, modern children, at least boys who are sons of educated parents, and put them in large masses by themselves, they will, without apparently any reading, rapidly invent a notion of law; that is, they will invent a certain set of customs which are the same thing to them as law, and which indeed are the same as law. They have tried in Johns Hopkins University experiments among children, to leave them entirely alone, without any instruction, and it is quite singular how soon customs will grow up, and it is also quite singular, and a thing that always surprises the socialist and communist, that about the earliest concept at which they will arrive is that of private property! They will soon get a notion that one child owns a stick, or toy, or seat, and the others must respect that property. This I merely use as an illustration to show how simple the notion of law was among our ancestors in England fifteen hundred years ago, and how it had grown up with them, of course, from many centuries, but in much the same way that the notion of custom or law grows up among children.

The "law" of the free Angelo-Saxon people was regarded as a thing existing by itself, like the sunlight, or at least as existing like a universally accepted custom observed by everyone. It was five hundred years before the notion crept into the minds, even of the members of the British Parliaments, that they could make a new law. What they supposed they did, and what they were understood by the people to do, was merely to declare the law, as it was then and as it had been from time immemorial; the notion always being—and the farther back you go and the more simple the people are, the more they have that notion—that their free laws and customs were something which came from the beginning of the world, which they always held, which were immutable, no more to be changed than the forces of nature; and that no Parliament, under the free Angelo-Saxon government or later under the Norman kings who tried to make them unfree, no king could ever make a law but could only declare what the law was. The Latin phrase for that distinction is jus dare, and jus dicere. In early England, in Anglo-Saxon times, the Parliament never did anything but tell what the law was; and, as I have said, not only what it was then but what it had been, as they supposed, for thousands of years before. The notion of a legislature to make new laws is an entirely modern conception of Parliament.

The notion of law as a statute, a thing passed by a legislature, a thing enacted, made new by representative assembly, is perfectly modern, and yet it has so thoroughly taken possession of our minds, and particularly of the American mind (owing to the forty-eight legislatures that we have at work, besides the national Congress, every year, and to the fact that they try to do a great deal to deserve their pay in the way of enacting laws), that statutes have assumed in our minds the main bulk of the concept of law as we formulate it to ourselves.

Statutes with us are recent, legislatures making statutes are recent everywhere; legislatures themselves are fairly recent; that is, they date only from the end of the Dark Ages, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries. Representative government itself is supposed, by most scholars, to be the one invention that is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people.

I am quite sure that all the American people when they think of law in the sense I am now speaking of, even when they are not thinking necessarily of statute law, do mean, nevertheless, a law which is enforced by somebody with power, somebody with a big stick. They mean a law, an ordinance, an order or dictate addressed to them by a sovereign, or at least by a power of some sort, and they mean an ordinance which if they break they are going to suffer for, either in person or in property. In other words, they have a notion of law as a written command addressed by the sovereign to the subject, or at least by one of the departments of government to the citizen. Now that, I must caution you, is in the first place rather a modern notion of law, quite modern in England; it is really Roman, and was not law as it was understood by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. He did not think of law as a thing written, addressed to him by the king. Neither did he necessarily think of it as a thing which had any definite punishment attached or any code attached, any "sanction," as we call it, or thing which enforces the law; a penalty or fine or imprisonment. There are just as good "sanctions" for law outside of the sanctions that our people usually think of as there are inside of them, and often very much better; for example, the sanction of a strong custom. Take any example you like; there are many states where marriage between blacks and whites is not made unlawful but where practically it is made tremendously unlawful by the force of public opinion [mores]. Take the case of debts of honor, so called, debts of gambling; they are paid far more universally than ordinary commercial debts, even by the same people; but there is no law enforcing them—there is no sanction for the collection of gambling debts. And take any custom that grows up. We know how strong our customs in college are. Take the mere custom of a club table; no one dares or ventures to supplant the members at that table. That kind of sanction is just as good a law as a law made by statute and imposing five or ten dollars' penalty or a week's imprisonment. And judges or juries recognize those things as laws, just as much as they do statute laws; when all other laws are lacking, our courts will ask what is the "custom of the trade." These be laws, and are often better enforced than the statute law; the rules of the New York Stock Exchange are better enforced than the laws of the state legislature. Now all our early Anglo-Saxon law was law of that kind. For the law was but universal custom, and that custom had no sanction; but for breach of the custom anybody could make personal attack, or combine with his friends to make attack, on the person who committed the breach, and then, when the matter was taken up by the members of both tribes, and finally by the witenagemot as a judicial court, the question was, what the law was. That was the working of the old Anglo-Saxon law, and it was a great many centuries before the notion of law changed from that in their minds. And this "unwritten law" perdures in the minds of many of the people today.

3. Religion and Social Control[275]

As a social fact religion is, indeed, not something apart from mores or social standards; it is these as regarded as "sacred." Strictly speaking there is no such thing as an unethical religion. We judge some religions as unethical because the mores of which they approve are not our mores, that is, the standards of higher civilization. All religions are ethical, however, in the sense that without exception they support customary morality, and they do this necessarily because the values which the religious attitude of mind universalizes and makes absolute are social values. Social obligations thus early become religious obligations. In this way religion becomes the chief means of conserving customs and habits which have been found to be safe by society or which are believed to conduce to social welfare.

As the guardian of the mores, religion develops prohibitions and "taboos" of actions of which the group, or its dominant class, disapproves. It may lend itself, therefore, to maintaining a given social order longer than that order is necessary, or even after it has become a stumbling-block to social progress. For the same reason it may be exploited by a dominant class in their own interest. It is in this way that religion has often become an impediment to progress and an instrument of class oppression. This socially conservative side of religion is so well known and so much emphasized by certain writers that it scarcely needs even to be mentioned. It is the chief source of the abuses of religion, and in the modern world is probably the chief cause of the deep enmity which religion has raised up for itself in a certain class of thinkers who see nothing but its negative and conservative side.

There is no necessity, however, for the social control which religion exerts being of a non-progressive kind. The values which religion universalizes and makes absolute may as easily be values which are progressive as those which are static. In a static society which emphasizes prohibitions and the conservation of mere habit or custom, religion will also, of course, emphasize the same things; but in a progressive society religion can as easily attach its sanctions to social ideals and standards beyond the existing order as to those actually realized. Such an idealistic religion will, however, have the disadvantages of appealing mainly to the progressive and idealizing tendencies of human nature rather than to its conservative and reactionary tendencies. Necessarily, also, it will appeal more strongly to those enlightened classes in society who are leading in social progress rather than to those who are content with things as they are. This is doubtless the main reason why progressive religions are exceedingly rare in human history, taking it as a whole, and have appeared only in the later stages of cultural evolution.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for believing that the inevitable evolution of religion has been in a humanitarian direction, and that there is an intimate connection between social idealism and the higher religions. There are two reasons for this generalization. The social life becomes more complex with each succeeding stage of upward development, and groups have therefore more need of commanding the unfailing devotion of their members if they are to maintain their unity and efficiency as groups. More and more, accordingly, religion in its evolution has come to emphasize the self-effacing devotion of the individual to the group in times of crisis. And as the complexity of social life increases, the crises increase in which the group must ask the unfailing service and devotion of its members. Thus religion in its upward evolution becomes increasingly social, until it finally comes to throw supreme emphasis upon the life of service and of self-sacrifice for the sake of the group; and as the group expands from the clan and the tribe to humanity, religion necessarily becomes less tribal and more humanitarian until the supreme object of the devotion which it inculcates must ultimately be the whole of humanity.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1. Social Control and Human Nature

Society, so far as it can be distinguished from the individuals that compose it, performs for those individuals the function of a mind. Like mind in the individual man, society is a control organization. Evidence of mind in the animal is the fact that it can make adjustments to new conditions. The evidence that any group of persons constitutes a society is the fact that the group is able to act with some consistency, and as a unit. It follows that the literature on social control, in the widest extension of that term, embraces most that has been written and all that is fundamental on the subject of society. In chapter ii, "Human Nature," and the later chapters on "Interaction" and its various forms, "Conflict," "Accommodation," and "Assimilation," points of view and literature which might properly be included in an adequate study of social control have already been discussed. The present chapter is concerned mainly with ceremonial, public opinion, and law, three of the specific forms in which social control has universally found expression.

Sociology is indebted to Edward Alsworth Ross for a general term broad enough to include all the special forms in which the solidarity of the group manifests itself. It was his brilliant essay on the subject published in 1906 that popularized the term social control. The materials for such a general, summary statement had already been brought together by Sumner and published in 1906 in his Folkways. This volume, in spite of its unsystematic character, must still be regarded as the most subtle analysis and suggestive statement about human nature and social relations that has yet been written in English.

A more systematic and thoroughgoing review of the facts and literature, however, is Hobhouse's Morals in Evolution. After Hobhouse the next most important writer is Westermarck, whose work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, published in 1906, was a pioneer in this field.

2. Elementary Forms of Social Control

Literature upon elementary forms of social control includes materials upon ceremonies, taboo, myth, prestige, and leadership. These are characterized as elementary because they have arisen spontaneously everywhere out of original nature. The conventionalized form in which we now find them has arisen in the course of their repetition and transmission from one generation to another and from one culture group to another. The fact that they have been transmitted over long periods of time and wide areas of territory is an indication that they are the natural vehicle for the expression of fundamental human impulses.

It is quite as true of leadership, as it is of myth and prestige, that it springs directly out of an emotional setting. The natural leaders are never elected and leadership is, in general, a matter that cannot be rationally controlled.

The materials upon ceremony, social ritual, and fashion are large in comparison with the attempts at a systematic study of the phenomena. Herbert Spencer's chapter on "Ceremonial Government," while it interprets social forms from the point of view of the individual rather than of the group, is still the only adequate survey of the materials in this special field.

Ethnology and folklore have accumulated an enormous amount of information in regard to primitive custom which has yet to be interpreted from the point of view of more recent studies of human nature and social life. The most important collections are Frazer's Golden Bough and his Totemism and Exogamy. Crawley's The Mystic Rose is no such monument of scholarship and learning as Frazer's Golden Bough, but it is suggestive and interesting.

Prestige and taboo represent fundamental human traits whose importance is by no means confined to the life of primitive man where, almost exclusively hitherto, they have been observed and studied.

The existing literature on leadership, while serving to emphasize the importance of the leader as a factor in social organization and social process, is based on too superficial an analysis to be of permanent scientific value. Adequate methods for the investigation of leadership have not been formulated. In general it is clear, however, that leadership must be studied in connection with the social group in which it arises and that every type of group will have a different type of leader. The prophet, the agitator, and the political boss are types of leaders in regard to whom there already are materials available for study and interpretation. A study of leadership should include, however, in addition to the more general types, like the poet, the priest, the tribal chieftain, and the leader of the gang, consideration of leadership in the more specific areas of social life, the precinct captain, the promoter, the banker, the pillar of the church, the football coach, and the society leader.

3. Public Opinion and Social Control

Public opinion, "the fourth estate" as Burke called it, has been appreciated, but not studied. The old Roman adage, Vox populi, vox dei, is a recognition of public opinion as the ultimate seat of authority. Public opinion has been elsewhere identified with the "general will." Rousseau conceived the general will to be best expressed through a plebiscite at which a question was presented without the possibilities of the divisive effects of public discussion. The natural impulses of human nature would make for more uniform and beneficial decisions than the calculated self-interest that would follow discussion and deliberation. English liberals like John Stuart Mill, of the latter half of the nineteenth century, looked upon freedom of discussion and free speech as the breath of life of a free society, and that tradition has come down to us a little shaken by recent experience, but substantially intact.

The development of advertising and of propaganda, particularly during and since the world-war, has aroused a great many misgivings, nevertheless, in regard to the traditional freedom of the press. Walter Lippmann's thoughtful little volume, Liberty and the News, has stated the whole problem in a new form and has directed attention to an entirely new field for observation and study.

De Tocqueville, in his study of the early frontier, Democracy in America, and James Bryce, in his American Commonwealth, have contributed a good deal of shrewd observation to our knowledge of the role of political opinion in the United States. The important attempts in English to define public opinion as a social phenomenon and study it objectively are A. V. Dicey's Law and Opinion in England in the Nineteenth Century and A. Lawrence Lowell's Public Opinion and Popular Government. Although Dicey's investigation is confined to England and to the nineteenth century, his analysis of the facts throws new light on the nature of public opinion in general. The intimate relation between the press and parliamentary government in England is revealed in an interesting historical monograph by Michael Macdonagh, The Reporters' Gallery.

4. Legal Institutions and Law

Public law came into existence in an effort of the community to deal with conflict. In achieving this result, however, courts of law invariably have sought to make their decisions first in accordance with precedent, and second in accordance with common sense. The latter insured that the law would be administered equitably; the former that interpretations of the law would be consistent. Post says:

Jural feelings are principally feelings of indignation as when an injustice is experienced by an individual, a feeling of fear as when an individual is affected by an inclination to do wrong, a feeling of penitence as when the individual has committed a wrong. With the feeling of indignation is joined a desire for vengeance, with the feeling of penitence a desire of atonement, the former tending towards an act of vengeance and the latter towards an act of expiation. The jural judgments of individuals are not complete judgments; they are based upon an undefined sense of right and wrong. In the consciousness of the individual there exists no standard of right and wrong under which every single circumstance giving rise to the formation of a jural judgment can be subsumed. A simple instinct impels the individual to declare an action right or wrong.[276]

If these motives are the materials with which the administration of justice has to deal, the legal motive which has invariably controlled the courts is something quite different. The courts in the administration of law have invariably sought, above all else, to achieve consistency. It is an ancient maxim of English law that "it is better that the law should be certain than that the law should be just."[277]

The conception implicit in the law is that the rule laid down in one case must apply in every similar case. In the effort to preserve this consistency in a constantly increasing variety of cases the courts have been driven to the formulation of principles, increasingly general and abstract, to multiply distinctions and subtleties, and to operate with legal fictions. All this effort to make the law a rationally consistent system was itself inconsistent with the conception that law, like religion, had a natural history and was involved, like language, in a process of growth and decay. It is only in recent years that comparative jurisprudence has found its way into the law schools. Although there is a vast literature upon the subject of the history of the law, Maine's Ancient Law, published in 1861, is still the classic work in this field in English.

More recently there has sprung up a school of "legal ethnology." The purpose of these studies is not to trace the historical development, of the law, but to seek in the forms in use in isolated and primitive societies materials which will reveal, in their more elementary expressions, motives and practices that are common to legal institutions of every people. In the Preface to a recent volume of Select Readings on the Origin and Development of Legal Institutions, the editors venture the statement, in justification of the materials from sociology that these volumes include, that "contrary, perhaps, to legal tradition, the law itself is only a social phenomenon and not to be understood in detachment from human uses, necessities and forces from which it arises." Justice Holmes's characterization of law as "a great anthropological document" seems to support that position.

Law in its origin is related to religion. The first public law was that which enforced the religious taboos, and the ceremonial purifications and expiations were intended to protect the community from the divine punishment for any involuntary disrespect or neglect of the rites due the gods which were the first crimes to be punished by the community as a whole, and for the reason that failure to punish or expiate them would bring disaster upon the community as a whole.

Maine says that the earliest conceptions of law or a rule of life among the Greeks are contained in the Homeric words Themis and Themistes.

When a king decided a dispute by a sentence, the judgment was assumed to be the result of direct inspiration. The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was Themis. The peculiarity of the conception is brought out by the use of the plural. Themistes, Themises, the plural of Themis, are the awards themselves, divinely dictated to the judge. Kings are spoken of as if they had a store of "Themistes" ready to hand for use; but it must be distinctly understood that they are not laws, but judgments. "Zeus, or the human king on earth," says Mr. Grote, in his History of Greece, "is not a law-maker, but a judge." He is provided with Themistes, but, consistently with the belief in their emanation from above, they cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle; they are separate, isolated judgments.[278]

It is only in recent times, with the gradual separation of the function of the church and the state, that legal institutions have acquired a character wholly secular. Within the areas of social life that are represented on the one hand by religion and on the other by law are included all the sanctions and the processes by which society maintains its authority and imposes its will upon its individual members.[279]

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. SOCIAL CONTROL AND HUMAN NATURE

(1) Maine, Henry S. Dissertations on Early Law and Custom. New York, 1886.

(2) Kocourek, Albert, and Wigmore, John H., editors. Evolution of Law. Select readings on the origin and development of legal institutions. Vol. I, "Sources of Ancient and Primitive Law." Vol. II, "Primitive and Ancient Legal Institutions." Vol. III, "Formative Influences of Legal Development." Boston, 1915.

(3) Sumner, W. G. Folkways. A study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals. Boston, 1906.

(4) Letourneau, Ch. L'Evolution de la morale. Paris, 1887.

(5) Westermarck, Edward. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2 vols. London, 1906-8.

(6) Hobhouse, L. T. Morals in Evolution. New ed. A study in comparative ethics. New York, 1915.

(7) Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. A study in religious sociology. Translated from the French by J. W. Swain. London, 1915.

(8) Novicow, J. Conscience et volonte sociales. Paris, 1897.

(9) Ross, Edward A. Social Control. A survey of the foundations of order. New York, 1906.

(10) Bernard, Luther L. The Transition to an Objective Standard of Social Control. Chicago, 1911.

II. ELEMENTARY FORMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL

A. Leadership

(1) Woods, Frederick A. The Influence of Monarchs. Steps in a new science of history. New York, 1913.

(2) Smith, J. M. P. The Prophet and His Problems. New York, 1914.

(3) Walter, F. Die Propheten in ihrem sozialen Beruf und das Wirtschaftsleben ihrer Zeit. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Sozialethik. Freiburg-in-Brisgau, 1900.

(4) Vierkandt, A. "Fuehrende Individuen bei den Naturvoelkern," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialwissenschaft, XI (1908), 542-53, 623-39.

(5) Dixon, Roland B. "Some Aspects of the American Shaman," The Journal of American Folk-Lore, XXI (1908), 1-12.

(6) Kohler, Josef. Philosophy of Law. (Albrecht's translation.) "Cultural Importance of Chieftainry." "Philosophy of Law Series," Vol. XII. [Reprinted in the Evolution of Law, II, 96-103.]

(7) Fustel de Coulanges. The Ancient City, Book III, chap. ix, "The Government of the City. The King," pp. 231-39. Boston, 1896.

(8) Leopold, Lewis. Prestige. A psychological study of social estimates. London, 1913.

(9) Clayton, Joseph. Leaders of the People. Studies in democratic history. London, 1910.

(10) Brent, Charles H. Leadership. New York, 1908.

(11) Rothschild, Alonzo. Lincoln: Master of Men. A study in character. Boston, 1906.

(12) Mumford, Eben. The Origins of Leadership. Chicago, 1909.

(13) Ely, Richard T. The World War and Leadership in a Democracy. New York, 1918.

(14) Terman, L. M. "A Preliminary Study of the Psychology and Pedagogy of Leadership," Pedagogical Seminary, XI (1904), 413-51.

(15) Miller, Arthur H. Leadership. A study and discussion of the qualities most to be desired in an officer. New York, 1920.

(16) Gowin, Enoch B. The Executive and His Control of Men. A study in personal efficiency. New York, 1915.

(17) Cooley, Charles H. "Genius, Fame and the Comparison of Races," Annals of the American Academy, IX (1897), 317-58.

(18) Odin, Alfred. Genese des grands hommes, gens de lettres francais modernes. Paris, 1895. [See Ward, Lester F., Applied Sociology, for a statement in English of Odin's study.]

(19) Kostyleff, N. Le Mecanisme cerebral de la pensee. Paris, 1914. [This is a study of the mechanism of the inspiration of poets and writers of romance.]

(20) Chabaneix, Paul. Physiologie cerebrale. Le subconscient chez les artistes, les savants, et les ecrivains. Bordeaux, 1897-98.

B. Ceremony, Rites, and Ritual

(1) Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Sociology, Part IV, "Ceremonial Institutions." Vol. II, pp. 3-225. London, 1893.

(2) Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture. Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom. Chap. xviii, "Rites and Ceremonies," pp. 362-442. New York, 1874.

(3) Frazer, J. G. Totemism and Exogamy. A treatise on certain early forms of superstition and society. 4 vols. London, 1910.

(4) Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Resemblances between the psychic life of savages and neurotics. Authorized translation from the German by A. A. Brill. New York, 1918.

(5) James, E. O. Primitive Ritual and Belief. An anthropological essay. With an introduction by R. R. Marett. London, 1917.

(6) Brinton, Daniel G. The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim. A contribution to the science and philosophy of religion. Chap. vi, "The Cult, Its Symbols and Rites," pp. 197-227. New York, 1876.

(7) Frazer, J. G. Golden Bough. A study in magic and religion. Part VI, "The Scapegoat." 3d ed. London, 1913.

(8) Nassau, R. H. Fetichism in West Africa. Forty years' observation of native customs and superstitions. New York, 1907.

(9) Hubert, H., and Mauss, M. "Essai sur la nature et la fonction de sacrifice," L'Annee sociologique, II (1897-98), 29-138.

(10) Farnell, L. R. The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion. New York, 1912.

(11) ——. The Cults of the Greek States. 5 vols. Oxford, 1896-1909.

(12) ——. "Religious and Social Aspects of the Cult of Ancestors and Heroes," Hibbert Journal, VII (1909), 415-35.

(13) Harrison, Jane E. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge, 1903.

(14) De-Marchi, A. Il Culto privato di Roma antica. Milano, 1896.

(15) Oldenberg, H. Die Religion des Veda. Part III, "Der Cultus," pp. 302-523. Berlin, 1894.

C. Taboo

(1) Thomas, N. W. Article on "Taboo" in Encyclopaedia Britannica, XXVI, 337-41.

(2) Frazer, J. G. The Golden Bough. A study in magic and religion. Part II, "Taboo and the Perils of the Soul." London, 1911.

(3) Kohler, Josef. Philosophy of Law. "Taboo as a Primitive Substitute for Law." "Philosophy of Law Series," Vol. XII. Boston, 1914. [Reprinted in Evolution of Law, II, 120-21.]

(4) Crawley, A. E. "Sexual Taboo," Journal of Anthropological Institute, XXIV (London, 1894), 116-25, 219-35, 430-45.

(5) Gray, W. "Some Notes on the Tannese," Internationales Archiv fuer Ethnographie, VII (1894), 232-37.

(6) Waitz, Theodor, und Gerland, Georg. Anthropologie der Naturvoelker, VI, 343-63. 6 vols. Leipzig, 1862-77.

(7) Tuchmann, J. "La Fascination," Melusine, II (1884-85), 169-175, 193-98, 241-50, 350-57, 368-76, 385-87, 409-17, 457-64, 517-24; III (1886-87), 49-56, 105-9, 319-25, 412-14, 506-8.

(8) Durkheim, E. "La prohibition de l'inceste et ses origines," L'Annee sociologique, I (1896-97), 38-70.

(9) Crawley, A. E. "Taboos of Commensality," Folk-Lore, VI (1895), 130-44.

(10) Hubert, H., and Mauss, M. "Le Mana," L'Annee sociologique, VII (1902-3), 108-22.

(11) Codrington, R. H. The Melanesians. Studies in their anthropology and folklore. "Mana," pp. 51-58, 90, 103, 115, 118-24, 191, 200, 307-8. Oxford, 1891.

D. Myths

(1) Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Chap. iv, "The Proletarian Strike," pp. 126-67. Translated from the French by T. E. Hulme. New York, 1912.

(2) Smith, W. Robertson. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. "Ritual, Myth and Dogma," pp. 16-24. New ed. London, 1907.

(3) Harrison, Jane E. Themis. A study of the social origins of Greek religion. Cambridge, 1912.

(4) Clodd, Edward. The Birth and Growth of Myth. Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature. New York, 1888.

(5) Gennep, A. van. La Formation des legendes. Paris, 1910.

(6) Langenhove, Fernand van. The Growth of a Legend. A study based upon the German accounts of francs-tireurs and "atrocities" in Belgium. With a preface by J. Mark Baldwin. New York, 1916.

(7) Case, S. J. The Millennial Hope. Chicago, 1918.

(8) Abraham, Karl. Dreams and Myths. Translated from the German by W. A. White. "Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series," No. 15. Washington, 1913.

(9) Pfister, Oskar. The Psychoanalytic Method. Translated from the German by C. R. Payne. Pp. 410-15. New York, 1917.

(10) Jung, C. G. Psychology of the Unconscious. A study of the transformations and symbolisms of the libido. A contribution to the history of the evolution of thought. Authorized translation from the German by Beatrice M. Hinkle. New York, 1916.

(11) Brinton, Daniel G. The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim. A contribution to the science and philosophy of religion. Chap. v, "The Myth and the Mythical Cycles," pp. 153-96. New York, 1876.

(12) Rivers, W. H. R. "The Sociological Significance of Myth," Folk-Lore, XXIII (1912), 306-31.

(13) Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. A psychological interpretation of mythology. "Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series," No. 18. Translated from the German by Drs. F. Robbins and Smith E. Jelliffe. Washington, 1914.

(14) Freud, Sigmund. "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren," Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre. 2d ed. Wien, 1909.

III. PUBLIC OPINION AND SOCIAL CONTROL

A. Materials for the Study of Public Opinion

(1) Lowell, A. Lawrence. Public Opinion and Popular Government. New York, 1913.

(2) Tarde, Gabriel. L'Opinion et la foule. Paris, 1901.

(3) Le Bon, Gustave. Les Opinions et les croyances; genese-evolution. Paris, 1911. [Discusses the formation of public opinion, trends, etc.]

(4) Bauer, Wilhelm. Die oeffentliche Meinung und ihre geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tuebingen, 1914.

(5) Dicey, A. V. Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. London, 1914.

(6) Shepard, W. J. "Public Opinion," American Journal of Sociology, XV (1909), 32-60.

(7) Tocqueville, Alexius de. The Republic of the United States of America. Book IV. "Influence of Democratic Opinion on Political Society," pp. 306-55. 2 vols. in one. New York, 1858.

(8) Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth, Vol. II, Part IV, "Public Opinion," pp. 239-64. Chicago, 1891.

(9) ——. Modern Democracies. 2 vols. New York, 1921.

(10) Lecky, W. E. H. Democracy and Liberty. New York, 1899.

(11) Godkin, Edwin L. Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy. Boston, 1898.

(12) Sageret, J. "L'opinion," Revue philosophique, LXXXVI (1918), 19-38.

(13) Bluntschli, Johann K. Article on "Public Opinion," Lalor's Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy and of the Political History of the United States. Vol. III, pp. 479-80.

(14) Lewis, George C. An Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion. London, 1849.

(15) Jephson, Henry. The Platform. Its rise and progress. 2 vols. London, 1892.

(16) Junius. (Pseud.) The Letters of Junius. Woodfall's ed., revised by John Wade. 2 vols. London, 1902.

(17) Woodbury, Margaret. Public Opinion in Philadelphia, 1789-1801. "Smith College Studies in History." Vol. V. Northampton, Mass., 1920.

(18) Heaton, John L. The Story of a Page. Thirty years of public service and public discussion in the editorial columns of The New York World. New York, 1913.

(19) Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers. New York, 1906.

(20) Harrison, Shelby M. Community Action through Surveys. A paper describing the main features of the social survey. Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1916.

(21) Millioud, Maurice. "La propagation des idees," Revue philosophique, LXIX (1910), 580-600; LXX (1910), 168-91.

(22) Scott, Walter D. The Theory of Advertising. Boston, 1903.

B. The Newspaper as an Organ of Public Opinion

(1) Dana, Charles A. The Art of Newspaper Making. New York, 1895.

(2) Irwin, Will. "The American Newspaper," Colliers, XLVI and XLVII (1911). [A series of fifteen articles beginning in the issue of January 21 and ending in the issue of July 29, 1911.]

(3) Park, Robert E. The Immigrant Press and Its Control. [In Press.] New York, 1921.

(4) Stead, W. T. "Government by Journalism," Contemporary Review, XLIX (1886), 653-74.

(5) Blowitz, Henri G. S. A. O. de. Memoirs of M. de Blowitz. New York, 1903.

(6) Cook, Edward. Delane of the Times. New York, 1916.

(7) Trent, William P. Daniel Defoe: How to Know Him. Indianapolis, 1916.

(8) Oberholtzer, E. P. Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Staat und der Zeitungspresse im Deutschen Reich. Nebst einigen Umrissen fuer die Wissenschaft der Journalistik. Berlin, 1895.

(9) Yarros, Victor S. "The Press and Public Opinion," American Journal of Sociology, V (1899-1900), 372-82.

(10) Macdonagh, Michael. The Reporters' Gallery. London, 1913.

(11) Lippmann, Walter. Liberty and the News. New York, 1920.

(12) O'Brien, Frank M. The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918. With an introduction by Edward Page Mitchell, editor of The Sun. New York, 1918.

(13) Hudson, Frederic. Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872. New York, 1873.

(14) Bourne, H. R. Fox. English Newspapers. London, 1887.

(15) Andrews, Alexander. The History of British Journalism. 2 vols. London, 1859.

(16) Lee, James Melvin. A History of American Journalism. Boston, 1917.

IV. LAW AND SOCIAL CONTROL

A. The Sociological Conception of Law

(1) Post, Albert H. "Ethnological Jurisprudence." Translated from the German by Thomas J. McCormack. Open Court, XI (1897), 641-53, 718-32. [Reprinted in Evolution of Law, II, 10-36.]

(2) Vaccaro, M. A. Les Bases sociologiques. Du droit et de l'etat. Translated by J. Gaure. Paris, 1898.

(3) Duguit, Leon. Law in the Modern State. With introduction by Harold Laski. Translated from the French by Frida and Harold Laski. New York, 1919. [The inherent nature of law is to be found in the social needs of man.]

(4) Picard, Edmond. Le Droit pur. Secs. 140-54. Paris, 1908. [Translated by John H. Wigmore, under the title "Factors of Legal Evolution," in Evolution of Law, III, 163-81.]

(5) Laski, Harold J. Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty. New Haven, 1917.

(6) ——. Authority in the Modern State. New Haven, 1919.

(7) ——. The Problem of Administrative Areas. An essay in reconstruction. Northampton, Mass., 1918.

B. Ancient and Primitive Law

(1) Maine, Henry S. Ancient Law. 14th ed. London, 1891.

(2) Fustel de Coulanges. The Ancient City. A study on the religion, laws, and institutions of Greece and Rome. Boston, 1894.

(3) Kocourek, Albert, and Wigmore, J. H., editors. Sources of Ancient and Primitive Law. "Evolution of Law Series." Vol. I. Boston, 1915.

(4) Steinmetz, S. R. Rechtsverhaeltnisse von eingeborenen Voelkern in Afrika und Oceanien. Berlin, 1903.

(5) Sarbah, John M. Fanti Customary Law. A brief introduction to the principles of the native laws and customs of the Fanti and Akan districts of the Gold Coast with a report of some cases thereon decided in the law courts. London, 1904. [Reprinted in Evolution of Law, I, 326-82.]

(6) McGee, W. J. "The Seri Indians," Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1895-96. Part I, pp. 269-95. [Reprinted in Evolution of Law, I, 257-78.]

(7) Dugmore, H. H. Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs. Grahamstown, South Africa, 1906. [Reprinted in Evolution of Law, I 292-325.]

(8) Spencer, Baldwin, and Gillen, F. J. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London, 1904. [Reprinted in Evolution of Law, I, 213-326.]

(9) Seebohm, Frederic. Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law. Being an essay supplemental to (1) "The English Village Community," (2) "The Tribal System in Wales." London, 1903.

C. The History and Growth of Law

(1) Wigmore, John H. "Problems of the Law's Evolution," Virginia Law Review, IV (1917), 247-72. [Reprinted, in part, in Evolution of Law, III, 153-58.]

(2) Robertson, John M. The Evolution of States. An introduction to English politics. New York, 1913.

(3) Jhering, Rudolph von. The Struggle for Law. Translated from the German by John J. Lalor. 1st ed. Chicago, 1879. [Chap. i, reprinted in Evolution of Law, III, 440-47.]

(4) Nardi-Greco, Carlo. Sociologia giuridica. Chap. viii, pp. 310-24. Torino, 1907. [Translated by John H. Wigmore under the title "Causes for the Variation of Jural Phenomena in General," in Evolution of Law, III, 182-97.]

(5) Bryce, James. Studies in History and Jurisprudence. Oxford, 1901.

(6) ——. "Influence of National Character and Historical Environment on the American Law." Annual address to the Bar Association, 1907. Reports of American Bar Association, XXXI (1907), 444-59. [Abridged and reprinted in Evolution of Law, III, 369-77.]

(7) Pollock, Frederick, and Maitland, Frederic W. The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. 2d ed. Cambridge, 1899.

(8) Jenks, Edward. Law and Politics in the Middle Ages. With a synoptic table of sources. London, 1913.

(9) Holdsworth, W. S. A History of English Law. 3 vols. London, 1903-9.

(10) The Modern Legal Philosophy Series. Edited by a committee of the Association of American Law Schools. 13 vols. Boston, 1911-.

(11) Continental Legal History Series. Published under the auspices of the Association of American Law Schools. 11 vols. Boston, 1912-.

(12) Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History. Compiled and edited by a committee of the Association of American Law Schools. 3 vols. Boston, 1907-9.

TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES

1. Social Interaction and Social Control

2. Social Control as the Central Fact and the Central Problem of Sociology

3. Social Control, Collective Behavior, and Progress

4. Manipulation and Participation as Forms of Social Control

5. Social Control and Self-Control

6. Accommodation as Control

7. Elementary Forms of Social Control: Ceremony, Fashion, Prestige, and Taboo, etc.

8. Traditional Forms of Control, as Folkways, Mores, Myths, Law, Education, Religion, etc.

9. Rumors, News, Facts, etc., as Forms of Control

10. Case Studies of the Influence of Myths, Legends, "Vital Lies," etc., on Collective Behavior

11. The Newspaper as Controlling and as Controlled by Public Opinion

12. Gossip as Social Control

13. Social Control in the Primary Group in the Village Community as Compared with Social Control in the Secondary Group in the City

14. An Analysis of Public Opinion in a Selected Community

15. The Politician and Public Opinion

16. The Social Survey as a Mechanism of Social Control

17. A Study of Common Law and Statute Law from the Standpoint of Mores and Public Opinion

18. A Concrete Example of Social Change Analyzed in Terms of Mores, the Trend, and Public Opinion, as Woman's Suffrage, Prohibition, the Abolition of Slavery, Birth Control, etc.

19. The Life History of an Institution from the Standpoint of Its Origin and Survival as an Agency of Control

20. Unwritten Law; a Case Study

21. Legal Fictions and Their Function in Legal Practice

22. The Sociology of Authority in the Social Group and in the State

23. Maine's Conception of Primitive Law

24. The Greek Conception of Themistes and Their Relation to Code of Solon

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What do you understand by social control?

2. What do you mean by elementary social control? How would you distinguish it from control exercised by public opinion and law?

3. How does social control in human society differ from that in animal society?

4. What is the natural history of social control in the crowd and the public?

5. What is the fundamental mechanism by which control is established in the group?

6. How do you explain the process by which a crisis develops in a social group? How is crisis related to control?

7. Under what conditions is a dictatorship a necessary form of control? Why?

8. In what way does the crowd control its members?

9. Describe and analyze your behavior in a crowd. Were you conscious of control by the group?

10. What is the mechanism of control in the public?

11. In what sense is ceremony a control?

12. How do music, rhythm, and art enter into social control?

13. Analyze the mechanism of the following forms of ceremonial control: the salute, the visit, the decoration, forms of address, presents, greetings. What other forms of ceremonial control occur to you?

14. What is the relation of fashions to ceremonial control?

15. What is the meaning to the individual of ceremony?

16. What are the values and limitations of ceremonial control?

17. What do you understand by "prestige" in interpreting control through leadership?

18. In what sense is prestige an aspect of personality?

19. What relation, if any, is there between prestige and prejudice?

20. How do you explain the prestige of the white man in South East Africa? Does the white man always have prestige among colored races?

21. What is the relation of taboo to contact? (See pp. 291-93.)

22. Why does taboo refer both to things "holy" and things "unclean"?

23. How does taboo function for social control?

24. Describe and analyze the mechanism of control through taboo in a selected group.

25. What examples do you discover of American taboos?

26. What is the mechanism of control by the myth?

27. "Myths are projections of our hopes and of our fears." Explain with reference to the Freudian wish.

28. How do you explain the growth of a legend? Make an analysis of the origin and development of the legend.

29. Under what conditions does the press promote the growth of myths and legends?

30. Does control by public opinion exist outside of democracies?

31. What is the relation of the majority and the minority to public opinion?

32. What is the distinction made by Lowell between (a) an effective majority, and (b) a numerical majority, with reference to public opinion?

33. What is the relation of mores to public opinion?

34. How do you distinguish between public opinion, advertising, and propaganda as means and forms of social control?

35. What is the relation of news to social control?

36. "The news columns are common carriers." Discuss the implications of this statement.

37. How do you explain the psychology of propaganda?

38. What is the relation between institutions and the mores?

39. What is the nature of social control exerted by the institution?

40. What is the relation of mores to common law and statute law?

41. "Under the free Anglo-Saxon government, no king could ever make a law, but could only declare what the law was." Discuss the significance of this fact.

42. In what different ways does religion control the behavior of the individual and of the group?

43. Is religion a conservative or a progressive factor in society?

FOOTNOTES:

[250] Chap. i, pp. 46-47.

[251] Robert E. Park and Herbert A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted, pp. 1-2. (New York, 1921.)

[252] Ernst Grosse, The Beginnings of Art, pp. 228-29. (New York, 1897.)

[253] See A. L. Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, pp. 12-13. (New York, 1913.)

[254] The American Party System, chap. viii. (New York, 1922.) [In press.]

[255] "On the afternoon of July 13, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke were seated together in the Chancellor's Room at Berlin. They were depressed and moody; for Prince Leopold's renunciation had been trumpeted in Paris as a humiliation for Prussia. They were afraid, too, that King William's conciliatory temper might lead him to make further concessions, and that the careful preparations of Prussia for the inevitable war with France might be wasted, and a unique opportunity lost. A telegram arrived. It was from the king at Ems, and described his interview that morning with the French ambassador. The king had met Benedetti's request for the guarantee required by a firm but courteous refusal; and when the ambassador had sought to renew the interview, he had sent a polite message through his aide-de-camp informing him that the subject must be considered closed. In conclusion, Bismarck was authorized to publish the message if he saw fit. The Chancellor at once saw his opportunity. In the royal despatch, though the main incidents were clear enough, there was still a note of doubt, of hesitancy, which suggested a possibility of further negotiation. The excision of a few lines would alter, not indeed the general sense, but certainly the whole tone of the message. Bismarck, turning to Moltke, asked him if he were ready for a sudden risk of war; and on his answering in the affirmative, took a blue pencil and drew it quickly through several parts of the telegram. Without the alteration or addition of a single word, the message, instead of appearing a mere 'fragment of a negotiation still pending,' was thus made to appear decisive. In the actual temper of the French people there was no doubt that it would not only appear decisive, but insulting, and that its publication would mean war.

"On July 14 the publication of the 'Ems telegram' became known in Paris, with the result that Bismarck had expected. The majority of the Cabinet, hitherto in favour of peace, were swept away by the popular tide; and Napoleon himself reluctantly yielded to the importunity of his ministers and of the Empress, who saw in a successful war the best, if not the only, chance of preserving the throne for her son. On the evening of the same day, July 14, the declaration of war was signed."—W. Alison Phillips, Modern Europe, 1815-1899, pp. 465-66. (London, 1903.)

[256] G. Tarde, L'opinion et la foule. (Paris, 1901.)

[257] L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, A Study in Comparative Ethics, pp. 13-14. (New York, 1915.)

[258] E. D. Morel, King Leopold's Rule in Africa. (London, 1904.)

[259] L. T. Hobhouse, op. cit., p. 85.

[260] The whole process of evolution by which a moral order has been established over ever wider areas of social life has been sketched in a masterly manner by Hobhouse in his chapter, "Law and Justice," op. cit., pp. 72-131.

[261] From Lieutenant Joseph S. Smith, Over There and Back, pp. 9-22. (E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917.)

[262] From Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, II, 3-6. (Williams & Norgate, 1893.)

[263] Adapted from Lewis Leopold, Prestige, pp. 16-62. (T. Fisher Unwin, 1913.)

[264] Adapted from Maurice S. Evans, Black and White in South East Africa, pp. 15-35. (Longmans, Green & Co., 1911.)

[265] From W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, pp. 152-447. (Adam and Charles Black, 1907.)

[266] From Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 133-37. (B. W. Huebsch, 1912.)

[267] Adapted from Fernand van Langenhove, The Growth of a Legend, pp. 5-275. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916.)

[268] From W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, pp. 16-24. (Adam and Charles Black, 1907.)

[269] Adapted from A. Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, pp. 3-14. (Longmans, Green & Co., 1913.)

[270] From Robert E. Park, The Crowd and the Public. (Unpublished manuscript.)

[271] Adapted from Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News, pp. 4-15. (Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920.)

[272] From Raymond Dodge, "The Psychology of Propaganda," Religious Education, XV (1920), 241-52.

[273] From William G. Sumner, Folkways, pp. 53-56. (Ginn & Co., 1906.)

[274] Adapted from Frederic J. Stimson, Popular Law-Making, pp. 2-16. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912.)

[275] From Charles A. Ellwood, "Religion and Social Control," in the Scientific Monthly, VII (1918), 339-41.

[276] Albert H. Post, Evolution of Law: Select Readings on the Origin and Development of Legal Institutions, Vol. II, "Primitive and Ancient Legal Institutions," complied by Albert Kocourek and John H. Wigmore; translated from the German by Thomas J. McCormack. Section 2, "Ethnological Jurisprudence," p. 12. (Boston, 1915.)

[277] Quoted by James Bryce, "Influence of National Character and Historical Environment on Development of Common Law," annual address to the American Bar Association, 1907, Reports of the American Bar Association, XXXI (1907), 447.

[278] Henry S. Maine, Ancient Law. Its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas, pp. 4-5. 14th ed. (London, 1891.)

[279] For the distinction between the cultural process and the political process see supra, pp. 52-53.



CHAPTER XIII

COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Collective Behavior Defined

A collection of individuals is not always, and by the mere fact of its collectivity, a society. On the other hand, when people come together anywhere, in the most casual way, on the street corner or at a railway station, no matter how great the social distances between them, the mere fact that they are aware of one another's presence sets up a lively exchange of influences, and the behavior that ensues is both social and collective. It is social, at the very least, in the sense that the train of thought and action in each individual is influenced more or less by the action of every other. It is collective in so far as each individual acts under the influence of a mood or a state of mind in which each shares, and in accordance with conventions which all quite unconsciously accept, and which the presence of each enforces upon the others.

The amount of individual eccentricity or deviation from normal and accepted modes of behavior which a community will endure without comment and without protest will vary naturally enough with the character of the community. A cosmopolitan community like New York City can and does endure a great deal in the way of individual eccentricity that a smaller city like Boston would not tolerate. In any case, and this is the point of these observations, even in the most casual relations of life, people do not behave in the presence of others as if they were living alone like Robinson Crusoe, each on his individual island. The very fact of their consciousness of each other tends to maintain and enforce a great body of convention and usage which otherwise falls into abeyance and is forgotten. Collective behavior, then, is the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse that is common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the result of social interaction.

2. Social Unrest and Collective Behavior

The most elementary form of collective behavior seems to be what is ordinarily referred to as "social unrest." Unrest in the individual becomes social when it is, or seems to be, transmitted from one individual to another, but more particularly when it produces something akin to the milling process in the herd, so that the manifestations of discontent in A communicated to B, and from B reflected back to A, produce the circular reaction described in the preceding chapter.

The significance of social unrest is that it represents at once a breaking up of the established routine and a preparation for new collective action. Social unrest is not of course a new phenomenon; it is possibly true, however, that it is peculiarly characteristic, as has been said, of modern life. The contrast between the conditions of modern life and of primitive society suggests why this may be true.

The conception which we ought to form of primitive society, says Sumner, is that of small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the group will be determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence and the internal organization of each group will correspond (1) to the size of the group, and (2) to the nature and intensity of the struggle with its neighbors.

Thus war and peace have reacted on each other and developed each other, one within the group, the other in the intergroup relation. The closer the neighbors, and the stronger they are, the intenser is the warfare, and then the intenser is the internal organization and discipline of each. Sentiments are produced to correspond. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the same situation. These relations and sentiments constitute a social philosophy. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. The ghosts of the latter will see with pleasure their descendants keep up the fight, and will help them. Virtue consists in killing, plundering, and enslaving outsiders.[280]

The isolation, territorial and cultural, under which alone it is possible to maintain an organization which corresponds to Sumner's description, has disappeared within comparatively recent times from all the more inhabitable portions of the earth. In place of it there has come, and with increasing rapidity is coming, into existence a society which includes within its limits the total population of the earth and is so intimately bound together that the speculation of a grain merchant in Chicago may increase the price of bread in Bombay, while the act of an assassin in a provincial town in the Balkans has been sufficient to plunge the world into a war which changed the political map of three continents and cost the lives, in Europe alone, of 8,500,000 combatants.

The first effect of modern conditions of life has been to increase and vastly complicate the economic interdependence of strange and distant peoples, i.e., to destroy distances and make the world, as far as national relations are concerned, small and tight.

The second effect has been to break down family, local, and national ties, and emancipate the individual man.

When the family ceases, as it does in the city, to be an economic unit, when parents and children have vocations that not only intercept the traditional relations of family life, but make them well nigh impossible, the family ceases to function as an organ of social control. When the different nationalities, with their different national cultures, have so far interpenetrated one another that each has permanent colonies within the territorial limits of the other, it is inevitable that the old solidarities, the common loyalties and the common hatreds that formerly bound men together in primitive kinship and local groups should be undermined.

A survey of the world today shows that vast changes are everywhere in progress. Not only in Europe but in Asia and in Africa new cultural contacts have undermined and broken down the old cultures. The effect has been to loosen all the social bonds and reduce society to its individual atoms. The energies thus freed have produced a world-wide ferment. Individuals released from old associations enter all the more readily into new ones. Out of this confusion new and strange political and religious movements arise, which represent the groping of men for a new social order.

3. The Crowd and the Public

Gustave Le Bon, who was the first writer to call attention to the significance of the crowd as a social phenomenon,[281] said that mass movements mark the end of an old regime and the beginning of a new.

"When the structure of a civilization is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall."[282] On the other hand, "all founders of religious or political creeds have established them solely because they were successful in inspiring crowds with those fanatical sentiments which have as result that men find their happiness in worship and obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their idol."[283]

The crowd was, for Le Bon, not merely any group brought together by the accident of some chance excitement, but it was above all the emancipated masses whose bonds of loyalty to the old order had been broken by "the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted." The crowd, in other words, typified for Le Bon the existing social order. Ours is an age of crowds, he said, an age in which men, massed and herded together in great cities without real convictions or fundamental faiths, are likely to be stampeded in any direction for any chance purpose under the influence of any passing excitement.

Le Bon did not attempt to distinguish between the crowd and the public. This distinction was first made by Tarde in a paper entitled "Le Public et la foule," published first in La Revue de Paris in 1898, and included with several others on the same general theme under the title L'Opinion et la foule which appeared in 1901. The public, according to Tarde, was a product of the printing press. The limits of the crowd are determined by the length to which a voice will carry or the distance that the eye can survey. But the public presupposes a higher stage of social development in which suggestions are transmitted in the form of ideas and there is "contagion without contact."[284]

The fundamental distinction between the crowd and the public, however, is not to be measured by numbers nor by means of communication, but by the form and effects of the interactions. In the public, interaction takes the form of discussion. Individuals tend to act upon one another critically; issues are raised and parties form. Opinions clash and thus modify and moderate one another.

The crowd does not discuss and hence it does not reflect. It simply "mills." Out of this milling process a collective impulse is formed which dominates all members of the crowd. Crowds, when they act, do so impulsively. The crowd, says Le Bon, "is the slave of its impulses."

"The varying impulses which crowds obey may be, according to their exciting causes, generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they will always be so imperious that the interest of the individual, even the interest of self-preservation, will not dominate them."[285]

When the crowd acts it becomes a mob. What happens when two mobs meet? We have in the literature no definite record. The nearest approach to it are the occasional accounts we find in the stories of travelers of the contacts and conflicts of armies of primitive peoples. These undisciplined hordes are, as compared with the armies of civilized peoples, little more than armed mobs. Captain S. L. Hinde in his story of the Belgian conquest of the Congo describes several such battles. From the descriptions of battles carried on almost wholly between savage and undisciplined troops it is evident that the morale of an army of savages is a precarious thing. A very large part of the warfare consists in alarms and excursions interspersed with wordy duels to keep up the courage on one side and cause a corresponding depression on the other.[286]

Gangs are conflict groups. Their organization is usually quite informal and is determined by the nature and imminence of its conflicts with other groups. When one crowd encounters another it either goes to pieces or it changes its character and becomes a conflict group. When negotiations and palavers take place as they eventually do between conflict groups, these two groups, together with the neutrals who have participated vicariously in the conflict, constitute a public. It is possible that the two opposing savage hordes which seek, by threats and boastings and beatings of drums, to play upon each other's fears and so destroy each other's morale, may be said to constitute a very primitive type of public.

Discussion, as might be expected, takes curious and interesting forms among primitive peoples. In a volume, Iz Derevni: 12 Pisem ("From the Country: 12 Letters"), A. N. Engelgardt describes the way in which the Slavic peasants reach their decisions in the village council.

In the discussion of some questions by the mir [organization of neighbors] there are no speeches, no debates, no votes. They shout, they abuse one another—they seem on the point of coming to blows; apparently they riot in the most senseless manner. Some one preserves silence, and then suddenly puts in a word, one word, or an ejaculation, and by this word, this ejaculation, he turns the whole thing upside down. In the end, you look into it and find that an admirable decision has been formed and, what is most important, a unanimous decision.... (In the division of land) the cries, the noise, the hubbub do not subside until everyone is satisfied and no doubter is left.[287]

4. Crowds and Sects

Reference has been made to the crowds that act, but crowds do not always act. Sometimes they merely dance or, at least, make expressive motions which relieve their feelings. "The purest and most typical expression of simple feeling," as Hirn remarks, "is that which consists of mere random movements."[288] When these motions assume, as they so easily do, the character of a fixed sequence in time, that is to say when they are rhythmical, they can be and inevitably are, as by a sort of inner compulsion, imitated by the onlookers. "As soon as the expression is fixed in rhythmical form its contagious power is incalculably increased."[289]

This explains at once the function and social importance of the dance among primitive people. It is the form in which they prepare for battle and celebrate their victories. It gives the form at once to their religious ritual and to their art. Under the influence of the memories and the emotions which these dances stimulate the primitive group achieves a sense of corporate unity, which makes corporate action possible outside of the fixed and sacred routine of ordinary daily life.

If it is true, as has been suggested, that art and religion had their origin in the choral dance, it is also true that in modern times religious sects and social movements have had their origin in crowd excitements and spontaneous mass movements. The very names which have been commonly applied to them—Quakers, Shakers, Convulsionaires, Holy Rollers—suggest not merely the derision with which they were at one time regarded, but indicate likewise their origin in ecstatic or expressive crowds, the crowds that do not act.

All great mass movements tend to display, to a greater or less extent, the characteristics that Le Bon attributes to crowds. Speaking of the convictions of crowds, Le Bon says:

When these convictions are closely examined, whether at epochs marked by fervent religious faith, or by great political upheavals such as those of the last century, it is apparent that they always assume a peculiar form which I cannot better define than by giving it the name of a religious sentiment.[290]

Le Bon's definition of religion and religious sentiment will hardly find general acceptance but it indicates at any rate his conception of the extent to which individual personalities are involved in the excitements that accompany mass movements.

A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.[291]

Just as the gang may be regarded as the perpetuation and permanent form of "the crowd that acts," so the sect, religious or political, may be regarded as a perpetuation and permanent form of the orgiastic (ecstatic) or expressive crowd.

"The sect," says Sighele, "is a crowd triee, selected, and permanent, the crowd is a transient sect, which does not select its members. The sect is the chronic form of the crowd; the crowd is the acute form of the sect."[292] It is Sighele's conception that the crowd is an elementary organism, from which the sect issues, like the chick from the egg, and that all other types of social groups "may, in this same manner, be deduced from this primitive social protoplasm." This is a simplification which the facts hardly justify. It is true that, implicit in the practices and the doctrines of a religious sect, there is the kernel of a new independent culture.

5. Sects and Institutions

A sect is a religious organization that is at war with the existing mores. It seeks to cultivate a state of mind and establish a code of morals different from that of the world about it and for this it claims divine authority. In order to accomplish this end it invariably seeks to set itself off in contrast with the rest of the world. The simplest and most effective way to achieve this is to adopt a peculiar form of dress and speech. This, however, invariably makes its members objects of scorn and derision, and eventually of persecution. It would probably do this even if there was no assumption of moral superiority to the rest of the world in this adoption of a peculiar manner and dress.

Persecution tends to dignify and sanctify all the external marks of the sect, and it becomes a cardinal principle of the sect to maintain them. Any neglect of them is regarded as disloyalty and is punished as heresy. Persecution may eventually, as was the case with the Puritans, the Quakers, the Mormons, compel the sect to seek refuge in some part of the world where it may practice its way of life in peace.

Once the sect has achieved territorial isolation and territorial solidarity, so that it is the dominant power within the region that it occupies, it is able to control the civil organization, establish schools and a press, and so put the impress of a peculiar culture upon all the civil and political institutions that it controls. In this case it tends to assume the form of a state, and become a nationality. Something approaching this was achieved by the Mormons in Utah. The most striking illustration of the evolution of a nationality from a sect is Ulster, which now has a position not quite that of a nation within the English empire.

This sketch suggests that the sect, like most other social institutions, originates under conditions that are typical for all institutions of the same species; then it develops in definite and predictable ways, in accordance with a form or entelechy that is predetermined by characteristic internal processes and mechanisms, and that has, in short, a nature and natural history which can be described and explained in sociological terms. Sects have their origin in social unrest to which they give a direction and expression in forms and practices that are largely determined by historical circumstances; movements which were at first inchoate impulses and aspirations gradually take form; policies are defined, doctrine and dogmas formulated; and eventually an administrative machinery and efficiencies are developed to carry into effect policies and purposes. The Salvation Army, of which we have a more adequate history than of most other religious movements, is an example.

A sect in its final form may be described, then, as a movement of social reform and regeneration that has become institutionalized. Eventually, when it has succeeded in accommodating itself to the other rival organizations, when it has become tolerant and is tolerated, it tends to assume the form of a denomination. Denominations tend and are perhaps destined to unite in the form of religious federations—a thing which is inconceivable of a sect.

What is true of the sect, we may assume, and must assume if social movements are to become subjects for sociological investigation, is true of other social institutions. Existing institutions represent social movements that survived the conflict of cultures and the struggle for existence.

Sects, and that is what characterizes and distinguishes them from secular institutions, at least, have had their origin in movements that aimed to reform the mores—movements that sought to renovate and renew the inner life of the community. They have wrought upon society from within outwardly. Revolutionary and reform movements, on the contrary, have been directed against the outward fabric and formal structure of society. Revolutionary movements in particular have assumed that if the existing structure could be destroyed it would then be possible to erect a new moral order upon the ruins of the old social structures.

A cursory survey of the history of revolutions suggests that the most radical and the most successful of them have been religious. Of this type of revolution Christianity is the most conspicuous example.

6. Classification of the Materials

The materials in this chapter have been arranged under the headings: (a) social contagion, (b) the crowd, and (c) types of mass movements. The order of materials follows, in a general way, the order of institutional evolution. Social unrest is first communicated, then takes form in crowd and mass movements, and finally crystallizes in institutions. The history of almost any single social movement—woman's suffrage, prohibition, protestantism—exhibit in a general way, if not in detail, this progressive change in character. There is at first a vague general discontent and distress. Then a violent, confused, and disorderly, but enthusiastic and popular movement, and finally the movement takes form; develops leadership, organization; formulates doctrines and dogmas. Eventually it is accepted, established, legalized. The movement dies, but the institution remains.

a) Social contagion.—The ease and the rapidity with which a cultural trait originating in one cultural group finds its way to other distant groups is familiar to students of folklore and ethnology. The manner in which fashions are initiated in some metropolitan community, and thence make their way, with more or less rapidity, to the provinces is an illustration of the same phenomenon in a different context.

Fashion plays a much larger role in social life than most of us imagine. Fashion dominates our manners and dress but it influences also our sentiments and our modes of thought. Everything in literature, art or philosophy that was characteristic of the middle of the nineteenth century, the "mid-Victorian period," is now quite out of date and no one who is intelligent now-a-days practices the pruderies, defends the doctrines, nor shares the enthusiasms of that period. Philosophy, also, changes with the fashion and Sumner says that even mathematics and science do the same. Lecky in his history of Rationalism in Europe describes in great detail how the belief in witches, so characteristic of the Middle Ages, gradually disappeared with the period of enlightenment and progress.[293] But the enlightenment of the eighteenth century was itself a fashion and is now quite out of date. In the meantime a new popular and scientific interest is growing up in obscure mental phenomena which no man with scientific training would have paid any attention to a few years ago because he did not believe in such things. It was not good form to do so.

But the changes of fashion are so pervasive, so familiar, and, indeed, universal phenomena that we do not regard the changes which they bring, no matter how fantastic, as quite out of the usual and expected order. Gabriel Tarde, however, regards the "social contagion" represented in fashion (imitation) as the fundamental social phenomenon.[294]

The term social epidemic, which is, like fashion, a form of social contagion, has a different origin and a different connotation. J. F. C. Hecker, whose study of the Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, published in 1832, was an incident of his investigation of the Black Death, was perhaps the first to give currency to the term.[295] Both the Black Death and the Dancing Mania assumed the form of epidemics and the latter, the Dancing Mania, was in his estimation the sequel of the former, the Black Death. It was perhaps this similarity in the manner in which they spread—the one by physical and the other by psychical infection—that led him to speak of the spread of a popular delusion in terms of a physical science. Furthermore, the hysteria was directly traceable, as he believed, to the prevailing conditions of the time, and this seemed to put the manifestations in the world of intelligible and controllable phenomena, where they could be investigated.

It is this notion, then, that unrest which manifests itself in social epidemics is an indication of pathological social conditions, and the further, the more general, conception that unrest does not become social and hence contagious except when there are contributing causes in the environment—it is this that gives its special significance to the term and the facts. Unrest in the social organism with the social ferments that it induces is like fever in the individual organism, a highly important diagnostic symptom.

b) The crowd.—Neither Le Bon nor any of the other writers upon the subject of mass psychology has succeeded in distinguishing clearly between the organized or "psychological" crowd, as Le Bon calls it, and other similar types of social groups. These distinctions, if they are to be made objectively, must be made on the basis of case studies. It is the purpose of the materials under the general heading of "The 'Animal' Crowd," not so much to furnish a definition, as to indicate the nature and sources of materials from which a definition can be formulated. It is apparent that the different animal groups behave in ways that are distinctive and characteristic, ways which are predetermined in the organism to an extent that is not true of human beings.

One other distinction may possibly be made between the so-called "animal" and the human crowd. The organized crowd is controlled by a common purpose and acts to achieve, no matter how vaguely it is defined, a common end. The herd, on the other hand, has apparently no common purpose. Every sheep in the flock, at least as the behavior of the flock is ordinarily interpreted, behaves like every other. Action in a stampede, for example, is collective but it is not concerted. It is very difficult to understand how there can be concerted action in the herd or the flock unless it is on an instinctive basis. The crowd, however, responds to collective representations. The crowd does not imitate or follow its leader as sheep do a bellwether. On the contrary, the crowd carries out the suggestions of the leader, and even though there be no division of labor each individual acts more or less in his own way to achieve a common end.