And yet, without leaving the present, without reasoning about this

future, which seems forever condemned to escape our reason, we should be

unable to act at all. Experience shows that the _framing of a future, in

some indeterminate time_, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very

effective, and have very few inconveniences; this happens when the

anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose

with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party, or of

a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of

instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of

complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily

than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and

mental activity. We know, moreover, that these social myths in no way

prevent a man profiting by the observations which he makes in the course

of his life, and form no obstacle to the pursuit of his normal

occupations.

The truth of this may be shown by numerous examples.

The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of

the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at

the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass,

but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that

certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of

Christ referred solely to this one point. The hopes which Luther and

Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means

realised; these fathers of the Reformation very soon seemed men of a

past era; for present-day Protestants they belong rather to the Middle

Ages than to modern times, and the problems which troubled them most

occupy very little place in contemporary Protestantism. Must we for that

reason deny the immense result which came from their dreams of Christian

renovation? It must be admitted that the real developments of the

Revolution did not in any way resemble the enchanting pictures which

created the enthusiasm of its first adepts; but without those pictures,

would the Revolution have been victorious? Many Utopias were mixed up

with the Revolutionary myth, because it had been formed by a society

passionately fond of imaginative literature, full of confidence in the

"science," and very little acquainted with the economic history of the

past. These Utopias came to nothing; but it may be asked whether the

Revolution was not a much more profound transformation than those

dreamed of by the people who in the eighteenth century had invented

social Utopias. In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of

his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that,

without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that

he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his

school.

A knowledge of what the myths contain in the way of details which will

actually form part of the history of the future is then of small

importance; they are not astrological almanacs; it is even possible that

nothing which they contain will ever come to pass--as was the case with

the catastrophe expected by the first Christians. In our own daily life,

are we not familiar with the fact that what actually happens is very

different from our preconceived notion of it? And that does not prevent

us from continuing to make resolutions. Psychologists say that there is

heterogeneity between the ends in view and the ends actually realised:

the slightest experience of life reveals this law to us, which Spencer

transferred into nature, to extract therefrom his theory of the

multiplication of effects.

The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt

to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid

of sense. _It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important:_ its

parts are only of interest in so far as they bring out the main idea. No

useful purpose is served, therefore, in arguing about the incidents

which may occur in the course of a social war, and about the decisive

conflicts which may give victory to the proletariat; even supposing the

revolutionaries to have been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up

this imaginary picture of the general strike, this picture may yet have

been, in the course of the preparation for the revolution, a great

element of strength, if it has embraced all the aspirations of

socialism, and if it has given to the whole body of revolutionary

thought a precision and a rigidity which no other method of thought

could have given.

To estimate, then, the significance of the idea of the general strike,

all the methods of discussion which are current among politicians,

sociologists, or people with pretensions to political science, must be

abandoned. Everything which its opponents endeavour to establish may be

conceded to them, without reducing in any way the value of the theory

which they think they have refuted. The question whether the general

strike is a partial reality, or only a product of popular imagination,

is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether

the general strike contains everything that the socialist doctrine

expects of the revolutionary proletariat.

To solve this question, we are no longer compelled to argue learnedly

about the future; we are not obliged to indulge in lofty reflections

about philosophy, history, or economics; we are not on the plane of

theories, and we can remain on the level of observable facts. We have to

question men who take a very active part in the real revolutionary

movement amidst the proletariat, men who do not aspire to climb into the

middle class and whose mind is not dominated by corporative prejudices.

These men may be deceived about an infinite number of political,

economical, or moral questions; but their testimony is decisive,

sovereign, and irrefutable when it is a question of knowing what are the

ideas which most powerfully move them and their comrades, which most

appeal to them as being identical with their socialistic conceptions,

and thanks to which their reason, their hopes, and their way of looking

at particular facts seem to make but one indivisible unity.

Thanks to these men, we know that the general strike is indeed what I

have said: the _myth_ in which socialism is wholly comprised, i.e., a

body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which

correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by

socialism against modern society. Strikes have engendered in the

proletariat the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that they

possess; the general strike groups them all in a co-ordinated picture,

and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of

intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts,

it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition

presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of socialism

which language cannot give us with perfect clearness--and we obtain it

as a whole, perceived instantaneously.

2. The Growth of a Legend[267]

Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors began

to circulate. They spread from place to place, they were reproduced by

the press, and they soon permeated the whole of Germany. It was said

that the Belgian people, instigated by the clergy, had intervened

perfidiously in the hostilities; had attacked by surprise isolated

detachments; had indicated to the enemy the positions occupied by the

troops; that women, old men, and even children had been guilty of

horrible atrocities upon wounded and defenseless German soldiers,

tearing out their eyes and cutting off fingers, nose, or ears; that the

priests from their pulpits had exhorted the people to commit these

crimes, promising them as a reward the Kingdom of Heaven, and had even

taken the lead in this barbarity.

Public credulity accepted these stories. The highest powers in the state

welcomed them without hesitation and indorsed them with their authority.

Even the Emperor echoed them, and, taking them for a text, advanced, in

the famous telegram of September 8, 1914, addressed to the President of

the United States, the most terrible accusations against the Belgian

people and clergy.

At the time of the invasion of Belgium, it was the German army which, as

we have seen, constituted the chief breeding ground for legendary

stories. These were disseminated with great rapidity among the troops;

the _liaison_ officers, the dispatch riders, the food convoys, the

victualling posts assured the diffusion of them.

These stories were not delayed in reaching Germany. As in most wars, it

was the returning soldiery who were responsible for the transmission of

them.

From the first day of hostilities in enemy territory the fighting troops

were in constant touch with those behind them. Through the frontier

towns there was a continual passage of convoys, returning empty or

loaded with prisoners and wounded. These last, together with the

escorting soldiers, were immediately surrounded and pressed for news by

an eager crowd. It is they who brought the first stories.

As a silent listener, seated on the boulevards, I have noticed

how curious people, men and women, question the wounded who are

resting there, suggesting to them answers to inquiries on the

subject of the battles, the losses, and the atrocities of war;

how they interpret silence as an affirmative answer and how

they wish to have confirmed things always more terrible. I am

convinced that shortly afterward they will repeat the

conversation, adding that they have heard it as the personal

experience of somebody present at the affair.

In their oral form stories of this kind are not definite, their

substance is malleable; they can be modified according to the taste of

the narrator; they transform themselves; they evolve. To sum up, not

only do the soldiers, returned from the field of battle, insure the

transmission of the stories, they also elaborate them.

The military post links the campaigning army directly with Germany. The

soldiers write home, and in their letters they tell of their adventures,

which people are eager to hear, and naturally they include the rumors

current among the troops. Thus a soldier of the Landsturm writes to his

wife that he has seen at Liége a dozen priests condemned to death

because they put a price on the heads of German soldiers; he had also

seen there civilians who had cut off the breasts of a Red Cross nurse.

Again, a Hessian schoolmaster tells in a letter how his detachment had

been treacherously attacked at Ch----by the inhabitants, with the curé

at their head.

Submitted to the test of the German military inquiry these stories are

shown to be without foundation. Received from the front and narrated by

a soldier who professes to have been an eyewitness, they are

nevertheless clothed in the public view with special authority.

Welcomed without control by the press, the stories recounted in letters

from the front appear, however, in the eyes of the readers of a paper

clothed with a new authority--that which attaches to printed matter.

They lose in the columns of a paper their individual and particular

character. Those who send them have, as the _Kölnische Volkszeitung_

notes, usually effaced all personal allusions. The statements thus

obtain a substance and an objectivity of which they would otherwise be

devoid. Mixed with authentic news, they are accepted by the public

without mistrust. Is not their appearance in the paper a guaranty of

accuracy?

Besides imposing itself on public credulity, the printed story fixes

itself in the mind. It takes a lasting form. It has entered permanently

into consciousness, and more, it has become a source of reference.

All these pseudo-historical publications are, however, only one aspect

of the abundant literary production of the Great War. All the varieties

of popular literature, the romances of cloak and sword, the stories of

adventure, the collections of news and anecdotes, the theater itself,

are in turn devoted to military events. The great public loves lively

activity, extraordinary situations, and sensational circumstances

calculated to strike the imagination and cause a shiver of horror.

So one finds in this literature of the lower classes the principal

legendary episodes of which we have studied the origin and followed the

development; accommodated to a fiction, woven into a web of intrigue,

they have undergone new transformations; they have lost every indication

of their source; they are transposed in the new circumstances imagined

for them; they have usually been dissociated from the circumstances

which individualize them and fix their time and place. The thematic

motives from which they spring nevertheless remain clearly recognizable.

The legendary stories have thus attained the last stage of their

elaboration and completed their diffusion. They have penetrated not only

into the purlieus of the cities but into distant countries; into

centers of education as among the popular classes. Wounded convalescents

and soldiers on leave at home for a time have told them to the city man

and to the peasant. Both have found them in letters from the front; both

have read them in journals and books, both have listened to the warnings

of the government and to the imperial word. The schoolteacher has mixed

these episodes with his teaching; he has nourished with them infantile

imaginations. Scholars have read the text of them in their classbooks

and have enacted them in the games inspired by the war; they have told

them at home in the family circle, giving them the authority attached to

the master's word.

Everywhere these accounts have been the subject of ardent commentaries;

in the village, in the councils held upon doorsteps, and in the barrooms

of inns; in the big cafés, the trams, and the public promenades of

towns. Everywhere they have become an ordinary topic of conversation,

everywhere they have met with ready credence. The term _franc tireur_

has become familiar. Its use is general and its acceptance widespread.

A collection of prayers for the use of the Catholic German soldiers

includes this incredible text: "Shame and malediction on him who wishes

to act like the Belgian and French, perfidious and cruel, who have even

attacked defenseless wounded."

3. Ritual, Myth, and Dogma[268]

The antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted

entirely of institutions and practices. No doubt, men will not

habitually follow certain practices without attaching a meaning to them;

but as a rule we find that while the practice was rigorously fixed, the

meaning attached to it was extremely vague, and the same rite was

explained by different people in different ways, without any question of

orthodoxy or heterodoxy arising in consequence. In ancient Greece, for

example, certain things were done at a temple, and people were agreed

that it would be impious not to do them. But if you had asked why they

were done, you would probably have had several mutually contradictory

explanations from different persons, and no one would have thought it a

matter of the least religious importance which of these you chose to

adopt. Indeed, the explanations offered would not have been of a kind to

stir any strong feeling; for in most cases they would have been merely

different stories as to the circumstances under which the rite first

came to be established, by the command or by the direct example of the

god. The rite, in short, was connected not with a dogma but with a myth.

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that

is, the sacred lore of priests and people, so far as it does not consist

of mere rules for the performance of religious acts, assumes the form of

stories about the gods; and these stories afford the only explanation

that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of

ritual. But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of

ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on

the worshippers. The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and

ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served

to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper; but he

was often offered a choice of several accounts of the same thing, and,

provided that he fulfilled the ritual with accuracy, no one cared what

he believed about its origin. Belief in a certain series of myths was

neither obligatory as a part of true religion, nor was it supposed that,

by believing, a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the favour

of the gods. What was obligatory or meritorious was the exact

performance of certain sacred acts prescribed by religious tradition.

This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent

place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of

ancient faiths. So far as myths consist of explanations of ritual, their

value is altogether secondary, and it may be affirmed with confidence

that in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not

the ritual from the myth; for the ritual was fixed and the myth was

variable, the ritual was obligatory and faith in the myth was at the

discretion of the worshipper. The conclusion is, that in the study of

ancient religions we must begin, not with myth, but with ritual and

traditional usage.

Nor can it be fairly set against this conclusion, that there are certain

myths which are not mere explanations of traditional practices, but

exhibit the beginnings of larger religious speculation, or of an

attempt to systematise and reduce to order the motley variety of local

worships and beliefs. For in this case the secondary character of the

myths is still more clearly marked. They are either products of early

philosophy, reflecting on the nature of the universe; or they are

political in scope, being designed to supply a thread of union between

the various worships of groups, originally distinct, which have been

united into one social or political organism; or, finally, they are due

to the free play of epic imagination. But philosophy, politics, and

poetry are something more, or something less, than religion pure and

simple.

There can be no doubt that, in the later stages of ancient religions,

mythology acquired an increased importance. In the struggle of

heathenism with scepticism on the one hand and Christianity on the

other, the supporters of the old traditional religions were driven to

search for ideas of a modern cast, which they could represent as the

true inner meaning of the traditional rites. To this end they laid hold

of the old myths, and applied to them an allegorical system of

interpretation. Myth interpreted by the aid of allegory became the

favourite means of infusing a new significance into ancient forms. But

the theories thus developed are the falsest of false guides as to the

original meaning of the old religions.

Religion in primitive times was not a system of belief with practical

applications; it was a body of fixed traditional practices, to which

every member of society conformed as a matter of course. Men would not

be men if they agreed to do certain things without having a reason for

their action; but in ancient religion the reason was not first

formulated as a doctrine and then expressed in practice, but conversely,

practice preceded doctrinal theory. Men form general rules of conduct

before they begin to express general principles in words; political

institutions are older than political theories, and in like manner

religious institutions are older than religious theories. This analogy

is not arbitrarily chosen, for in fact the parallelism in ancient

society between religious and political institutions is complete. In

each sphere great importance was attached to form and precedent, but the

explanation why the precedent was followed consisted merely of a legend

as to its first establishment. That the precedent, once established, was

authoritative did not appear to require any proof. The rules of society

were based on precedent, and the continued existence of the society was

sufficient reason why a precedent once set should continue to be

followed.

I say that the oldest religious and political institutions present a

close analogy. It would be more correct to say that they were parts of

one whole of social custom. Religion was a part of the organised social

life into which a man was born, and to which he conformed through life

in the same unconscious way in which men fall into any habitual practice

of the society in which they live. Men took the gods and their worship

for granted, just as they took the other usages of the state for

granted, and if they reasoned or speculated about them, they did so on

the presupposition that the traditional usages were fixed things, behind

which their reasonings must not go, and which no reasoning could be

allowed to overturn. To us moderns religion is above all a matter of

individual conviction and reasoned belief, but to the ancients it was a

part of the citizen's public life, reduced to fixed forms, which he was

not bound to understand and was not at liberty to criticise or to

neglect. Religious non-conformity was an offence against the state; for

if sacred tradition was tampered with the bases of society were

undermined, and the favour of the gods was forfeited. But so long as the

prescribed forms were duly observed, a man was recognised as truly

pious, and no one asked how his religion was rooted in his heart or

affected his reason. Like political duty, of which indeed it was a part,

religion was entirely comprehended in the observance of certain fixed

rules of outward conduct.

From the antique point of view, indeed, the question what the gods are

in themselves is not a religious but a speculative one; what is

requisite to religion is a practical acquaintance with the rules on

which the deity acts and on which he expects his worshippers to frame

their conduct--what in II Kings 17:26 is called the "manner" or rather

the "customary law" (_mishpat_) of the god of the land. This is true

even of the religion of Israel. When the prophets speak of the knowledge

of God, they always mean a practical knowledge of the laws and

principles of His government in Israel, and a summary expression for

religion as a whole is "the knowledge and fear of Jehovah," i.e., the

knowledge of what Jehovah prescribes, combined with a reverent

obedience.

The traditional usages of religion had grown up gradually in the course

of many centuries, and reflected habits of thought characteristic of

very diverse stages of man's intellectual and moral development. No one

conception of the nature of the gods could possibly afford the clue to

all parts of that motley complex of rites and ceremonies which the later

paganism had received by inheritance, from a series of ancestors in

every state of culture from pure savagery upwards. The record of the

religious thought of mankind, as it is embodied in religious

institutions, resembles the geological record of the history of the

earth's crust; the new and the old are preserved side by side or rather

layer upon layer. The classification of ritual formations in their

proper sequence is the first step towards their explanation, and that

explanation itself must take the form, not of a speculative theory, but

of a rational life-history.

4. The Nature of Public Opinion[269]

"_Vox populi_ may be _vox Dei_, but very little attention shows that

there has never been any agreement as to what _vox_ means or as to what

_populus_ means." In spite of endless discussions about democracy, this

remark of Sir Henry Maine is still so far true that no other excuse is

needed for studying the conceptions which lie at the very base of

popular government. In doing so one must distinguish the form from the

substance; for the world of politics is full of forms in which the

spirit is dead--mere shams, but sometimes not recognized as such even by

the chief actors, sometimes deceiving the outside multitude, sometimes

no longer misleading anyone. Shams, are, indeed, not without value.

Political shams have done for English government what fictions have done

for English law. They have promoted growth without revolutionary change.

But while shams play an important part in political evolution, they are

snares for the political philosopher who fails to see through them, who

ascribes to the forms a meaning that they do not really possess. Popular

government may in substance exist under the form of a monarchy, and an

autocratic despotism can be set up without destroying the forms of

democracy. If we look through the forms to observe the vital forces

behind them; if we fix our attention, not on the procedure, the extent

of the franchise, the machinery of elections, and such outward things,

but on the essence of the matter, popular government, in one important

aspect at least, may be said to consist of the control of political

affairs by public opinion.

If two highwaymen meet a belated traveler on a dark road and propose to

relieve him of his watch and wallet, it would clearly be an abuse of

terms to say that in the assemblage on that lonely spot there was a

public opinion in favor of a redistribution of property. Nor would it

make any difference, for this purpose, whether there were two highwaymen

and one traveler, or one robber and two victims. The absurdity in such a

case of speaking about the duty of the minority to submit to the verdict

of public opinion is self-evident; and it is not due to the fact that

the three men on the road form part of a larger community, or that they

are subject to the jurisdiction of a common government. The expression

would be quite as inappropriate if no organized state existed; on a

savage island, for example, where two cannibals were greedy to devour

one shipwrecked mariner. In short, the three men in each of the cases

supposed do not form a community that is capable of a public opinion on

the question involved. May this not be equally true under an organized

government, among people that are for certain purposes a community?

To take an illustration nearer home. At the time of the Reconstruction

that followed the American Civil War the question whether public opinion

in a southern state was or was not in favor of extending the suffrage to

the Negroes could not in any true sense be said to depend on which of

the two races had a slight numerical majority. One opinion may have been

public or general in regard to the whites, the other public or general

in regard to the Negroes, but neither opinion was public or general in

regard to the whole population. Examples of this kind could be

multiplied indefinitely. They can be found in Ireland, in

Austria-Hungary, in Turkey, in India, in any country where the cleavage

of race, religion, or politics is sharp and deep enough to cut the

community into fragments too far apart for an accord on fundamental

matters.

In all these instances an opinion cannot be public or general with

respect to both elements in the state. For that purpose they are as

distinct as if they belonged to different commonwealths. You may count

heads, you may break heads, you may impose uniformity by force; but on

the matters at stake the two elements do not form a community capable

of an opinion that is in any rational sense public or general. If we are

to employ the term in a sense that is significant for government, that

imports any obligation moral or political on the part of the minority,

surely enough has been said to show that the opinion of a mere majority

does not by itself always suffice. Something more is clearly needed.

But if the opinion of a majority does not of itself constitute a public

opinion, it is equally certain that unanimity is not required. Unanimous

opinion is of no importance for our purpose, because it is perfectly

sure to be effective in any form of government, however despotic, and it

is, therefore, of no particular interest in the study of democracy.

Legislation by unanimity was actually tried in the kingdom of Poland,

where each member of the assembly had the right of _liberum veto_ on any

measure, and it prevented progress, fostered violence, and spelled

failure. The Polish system has been lauded as the acme of liberty, but

in fact it was directly opposed to the fundamental principle of modern

popular government; that is, the conduct of public affairs in accord

with a public opinion which is general, although not universal, and

which implies under certain conditions a duty on the part of the

minority to submit.

A body of men are politically capable of a public opinion only so far as

they are agreed upon the ends and aims of government and upon the

principles by which those ends shall be attained. They must be united,

also, about the means whereby the action of the government is to be

determined, in a conviction, for example, that the views of a

majority--or it may be some other portion of their numbers--ought to

prevail, and a political community as a whole is capable of public

opinion only when this is true of the great bulk of the citizens. Such

an assumption was implied, though usually not expressed in all theories

of the social compact; and, indeed, it is involved in all theories that

base rightful government upon the consent of the governed, for the

consent required is not a universal approval by all the people of every

measure enacted, but a consensus in regard to the legitimate character

of the ruling authority and its right to decide the questions that

arise.

One more remark must be made before quitting the subject of the relation

of public opinion to the opinion of the majority. The late Gabriel

Tarde, with his habitual keen insight, insisted on the importance of the

intensity of belief as a factor in the spread of opinions. There is a

common impression that public opinion depends upon and is measured by

the mere number of persons to be found on each side of a question; but

this is far from accurate. If 49 per cent of a community feel very

strongly on one side, and 51 per cent are lukewarmly on the other, the

former opinion has the greater public force behind it and is certain to

prevail ultimately, if it does not at once.

One man who holds his belief tenaciously counts for as much as several

men who hold theirs weakly, because he is more aggressive and thereby

compels and overawes others into apparent agreement with him, or at

least into silence and inaction. This is, perhaps, especially true of

moral questions. It is not improbable that a large part of the accepted

moral code is maintained by the earnestness of a minority, while more

than half of the community is indifferent or unconvinced. In short,

public opinion is not strictly the opinion of the numerical majority,

and no form of its expression measures the mere majority, for individual

views are always to some extent weighed as well as counted.

Without attempting to consider how the weight attaching to intensity and

intelligence can be accurately gauged, it is enough for our purpose to

point out that when we speak of the opinion of a majority we mean, not

the numerical, but the effective, majority.

5. Public Opinion and the Mores[270]

We are interested in public opinion, I suppose, because public opinion

is, in the long run, the sovereign power in the state. There is not now,

and probably there never has been a government that did not rest on

public opinion. The best evidence of this is the fact that all

governments have invariably sought either to _control_ or, at least, to

inspire and direct it.

The Kaiser had his "official" and his "semiofficial" organs. The

communists in Russia have taken possession of the schools. It is in the

schoolroom that the bolshevists propose to complete the revolution.

Hume, the English historian, who was also the greatest of English

philosophers, said:

As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors

have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore on

opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends

to the most despotic and the most military governments as well

as to the most free and popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the

emperor of Rome, might drive their helpless subjects, like

brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclinations, but he

must at least have led his mameluks, or praetorian bands, like

men, by their opinions.

Hume's statement is too epigrammatic to be true. Governments can and do

maintain themselves by force rather than consent. They have done this

even when they were greatly inferior in numbers. Witness Cortez in

Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, and the recent English conquest, with

two hundred aeroplanes, of the Mad Mullah in Somaliland. Civilized

people must be governed in subtle ways. Unpopular governments maintain

themselves sometimes by taking possession of the means of communication,

by polluting the sources of information, by suppressing newspapers, by

propaganda.

Caspar Schmidt, "Max Stirner," the most consistent of anarchists, said

the last tyranny is the tyranny of the idea. The last tyrant, in other

words, is the propagandist, the individual who gives a "slant" to the

facts in order to promote his own conception of the welfare of the

community.

We use the word public opinion in a wider and in a narrower sense. The

public, the popular mind, is controlled by something more than opinion,

or public opinion, in the narrower sense.

We are living today under the subtle tyranny of the advertising man. He

tells us what to wear, and makes us wear it. He tells us what to eat,

and makes us eat it. We do not resent this tyranny. We do not feel it.

We do what we are told; but we do it with the feeling that we are

following our own wild impulses. This does not mean that, under the

inspiration of advertisements, we act irrationally. We have reasons; but

they are sometimes after-thoughts. Or they are supplied by the

advertiser.

Advertising is one form of social control. It is one way of capturing

the public mind. But advertising does not get its results by provoking

discussion. That is one respect in which it differs from public opinion.

Fashion is one of the subtler forms of control to which we all bow. We

all follow the fashions at a greater or less distance. Some of us fall

behind the fashions, but no one ever gets ahead of them. No one ever can

get ahead of the fashions because we never know what they are, until

they arrive.

Fashion, in the broad sense, comes under the head of what Herbert

Spencer called ceremonial government. Ceremony, he said, is the most

primitive and the most effective of all forms of government. There is no

rebellion against fashion; no rebellion against social ritual. At least

these rebellions never make martyrs or heroes. Dr. Mary Walker, who wore

men's clothes, was a heroine no doubt, but never achieved martyrdom.

So far as ceremonial government finds expression in a code it is

etiquette, social ritual, form. We do not realize how powerful an

influence social form is. There are breaches of etiquette that any

ordinary human being would rather die than be guilty of.

We often speak of social usages and the dictates of fashion as if they

were imposed by public opinion. This is not true, if we are to use

public opinion in the narrower sense. Social usages are not matters of

opinion; they are matters of custom. They are fixed in habits. They are

not matters of reflection, but of impulse. They are parts of ourselves.

There is an intimate relation between public opinion and social customs

or the mores, as Sumner calls them. But there is this difference: Public

opinion fluctuates. It wobbles. Social customs, the mores, change

slowly. Prohibition was long in coming; but the custom of drinking has

not disappeared. The mores change slowly; but they change _in one

direction_ and they change _steadily_. Mores change as fashion does; as

language does; by a law of their own.

Fashions must change. It is in their nature to do so. As the existing

thing loses its novelty it is no longer stimulating; no longer

interesting. It is no longer the fashion.

What fashion demands is not something new; but something different. It

demands the old in a new and stimulating form. Every woman who is up

with the fashion wants to be in the fashion; but she desires to be

something different from everyone else, especially from her best friend.

Language changes in response to the same motives and according to the

same law. We are constantly seeking new metaphors for old ideas;

constantly using old metaphors to express new ideas. Consider the way

that slang grows!

There is a fashion or a trend in public opinion. A. V. Dicey, in his

volume on _Law and Opinion in England_, points out that there has been a

constant tendency, for a hundred years, in English legislation, from

individualism to collectivism. This does not mean that public opinion

has changed constantly in one direction. There have been, as he says,

"cross currents." Public opinion has veered, but the changes in the

mores have been steadily in one direction.

There has been a change in the fundamental attitudes. This change has

taken place in response to changed conditions. Change in mores is

something like change in the nest-building habits of certain birds, the

swallows, for example. This change, like the change in bird habits,

takes place without discussion--without clear consciousness--in response

to changed conditions. Furthermore, changes in the mores, like changes

in fashion, are only slightly under our control. They are not the result

of agitation; rather they are responsible for the agitation.

There are profound changes going on in our social organization today.

Industrial democracy, or something corresponding to it, is coming. It is

coming not entirely because of social agitation. It is coming, perhaps,

in spite of agitation. It is a social change, but it is part of the

whole cosmic process.

There is an intimate relation between the mores and opinion. The mores

represent the attitudes in which we agree. Opinion represents these

attitudes in so far as we do not agree. We do not have opinions except

over matters which are in dispute.

So far as we are controlled by habit and custom, by the mores, we do not

have opinions. I find out what my opinion is only after I discover that

I disagree with my fellow. What I call my opinions are for the most part

invented to justify my agreements or disagreements with prevailing

public opinion. The mores do not need justification. As soon as I seek

justification for them they have become matters of opinion.

Public opinion is just the opinion of individuals plus their

differences. There is no public opinion where there is no substantial

agreement. But there is no public opinion where there is not

disagreement. Public opinion presupposes public discussion. When a

matter has reached the stage of public discussion it becomes a matter of

public opinion.

Before war was declared in France there was anxiety, speculation. After

mobilization began, discussion ceased. The national ideal was exalted.

The individual ceased to exist. Men ceased even to think. They simply

obeyed. This is what happened in all the belligerent countries except

America. It did not quite happen here. Under such circumstances public

opinion ceases to exist. This is quite as true in a democracy as it is

in an autocracy.

The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is not that in one

the will of the people finds expression and in the other it does not. It

is simply that in a democracy a larger number of the citizens

participate in the discussions which give rise to public opinion. At

least they are supposed to do so. In a democracy everyone belongs, or is

supposed to belong, to one great public. In an autocracy there are

perhaps many little publics.

What rôle do the schools and colleges play in the formation of public

opinion? The schools transmit the tradition. They standardize our

national prejudices and transmit them. They do this necessarily.

A liberal or college education tends to modify and qualify all our

inherited political, religious, and social prejudices. It does so by

bringing into the field of discussion matters that would not otherwise

get into the public consciousness. In this way a college education puts

us in a way to control our prejudices instead of being controlled by

them. This is the purpose of a liberal education.

The emancipation which history, literature, and a wider experience with

life give us permits us to enter sympathetically into the lives and

interests of others; it widens that area over which public opinion

rather than force exercises control.

It makes it possible to extend the area of political control. It means

the extension of democratic participation in the common life. The

universities, by their special studies in the field of social science,

are seeking to accumulate and bring into the view of public opinion a

larger body of attested fact upon which the public may base its opinion.

It is probably not the business of the universities to agitate reforms

nor to attempt directly to influence public opinion in regard to current

issues. To do this is to relax its critical attitude, lessen its

authority in matters of fact, and jeopardize its hard-won academic

freedom. When a university takes over the function of a political party

or a church it ceases to perform its function as a university.

6. News and Social Control[271]

Everywhere today men are conscious that somehow they must deal with

questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared

them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand

them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly

they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are

wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the

manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an

exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in

journalism.

I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corruption.

There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste

pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs,

petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris

Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their

species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern

journalism.

Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently:

Now there is much pettiness--and almost incredible stupidity

and ignorance--in the so-called free press; but it is the

pettiness, etc., common to the so-called human race--a

pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters, landlords, poets,

and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the usual

aristocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all

American newspapers to make fun of everything in season and

out, we quarrel again. There is an incurable desire in American

newspapers to take things much more seriously than they

deserve. Does Miss Lowell read the ponderous news from

Washington? Does she read the society news? Does she, we

wonder, read the newspapers?

Mr. Adams does read them, and when he writes that the newspapers take

things much more seriously than they deserve, he has, as the mayor's

wife remarked to the queen, said a mouthful. Since the war, especially,

editors have come to believe that their highest duty is not to report

but to instruct, not to print news but to save civilization, not to

publish what Benjamin Harris calls "the Circumstances of Publique

Affairs, both abroad and at home," but to keep the nation on the

straight and narrow path. Like the kings of England, they have elected

themselves Defenders of the Faith. "For five years," says Mr. Cobb of

the _New York World_, "there has been no free play of public opinion in

the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war, governments

conscripted public opinion. They goose-stepped it. They taught it to

stand at attention and salute. It sometimes seems that, after the

armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a vow that

they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They were willing

to die for their country but not willing to think for it." That

minority, which is proudly prepared to think for it, and not only

prepared but cocksure that it alone knows how to think for it, has

adopted the theory that the public should know what is good for it.

The work of reporters has thus become confused with the work of

preachers, revivalists, prophets, and agitators. The current theory of

American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a

grace-like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the

necessities of civilization require the sacrifice. To Archbishop

Whately's dictum that it matters greatly whether you put truth in the

first place or the second, the candid expounder of modern journalism

would reply that he put truth second to what he conceived to be the

national interest. Judged simply by their product, men like Mr. Ochs or

Viscount Northcliffe believe that their respective nations will perish

and civilization decay unless their idea of what is patriotic is

permitted to temper the curiosity of their readers.

They believe that edification is more important than veracity. They

believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves

upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other

considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this but

one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end justifies

the means? A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct was, I believe,

never devised among men. It was a plausible rule as long as men believed

that an omniscient and benevolent Providence taught them what end to

seek. But now that men are critically aware of how their purposes are

special to their age, their locality, their interests, and their limited

knowledge, it is blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won standards of

credibility to some special purpose. It is nothing but the doctrine that

I want what I want when I want it. Its monuments are the Inquisition

and the invasion of Belgium. It is the reason given for every act of

unreason, the law invoked whenever lawlessness justifies itself. At

bottom it is nothing but the anarchical nature of man imperiously

hacking its way through.

Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high

places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most

destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose

profession it is to report the news. The news columns are common

carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right

to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for

what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded. For

when a people can no longer confidently repair "to the best fountains

for their information," then anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each

man's hope and each man's whim, become the basis of government. All that

the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no

steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and

aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster,

must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts.

No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.

Few episodes in recent history are more poignant than that of the

British prime minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that

morning's paper before him, protesting that he cannot do the sensible

thing in regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has

drugged the public. That incident is a photograph of the supreme danger

which confronts popular government. All other dangers are contingent

upon it, for the news is the chief source of the opinion by which

government now proceeds. So long as there is interposed between the

ordinary citizen and the facts a news organization determining by

entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he

shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say

that the substance of democratic government is secure. The theory of our

constitution, says Mr. Justice Holmes, is that truth is the only ground

upon which men's wishes safely can be carried out. In so far as those

who purvey the news make of their own beliefs a higher law than truth,

they are attacking the foundations of our constitutional system. There

can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the

devil.

In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a people

professing government by the will of the people should have made no

serious effort to guarantee the news without which a governing opinion

cannot exist. "Is it possible," they will ask, "that at the beginning of

the twentieth century nations calling themselves democracies were

content to act on what happened to drift across their doorsteps; that

apart from a few sporadic exposures and outcries they made no plans to

bring these common carriers under social control, that they provided no

genuine training schools for the men upon whose sagacity they were

dependent; above all, that their political scientists went on year after

year writing and lecturing about government without producing one

single, significant study of the process of public opinion?" And then

they will recall the centuries in which the church enjoyed immunity from

criticism, and perhaps they will insist that the news structure of

secular society was not seriously examined for analogous reasons.

7. The Psychology of Propaganda[272]

Paper bullets, according to Mr. Creel, won the war. But they have

forever disturbed our peace of mind. The war is long since over, all but

saying so; but our consciousness of the immanence of propaganda bids

fair to be permanent. It has been discovered by individuals, by

associations, and by governments that a certain kind of advertising can

be used to mold public opinion and control democratic majorities. As

long as public opinion rules the destinies of human affairs, there will

be no end to an instrument that controls it.

The tremendous forces of propaganda are now common property. They are

available for the unscrupulous and the destructive as well as for the

constructive and the moral. This gives us a new interest in its

technique, namely, to inquire if anywhere there is an opportunity for

regulative and protective interference with its indiscriminate

exploitation.

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 _blasé_ 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 _blasé_. 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

rôle 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'Évolution 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, Émile. _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 volonté 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. "Führende Individuen bei den Naturvölkern,"

_Zeitschrift für 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. _Genèse des grands hommes, gens de lettres français

modernes_. Paris, 1895. [See Ward, Lester F., _Applied Sociology_, for a

statement in English of Odin's study.]

(19) Kostyleff, N. _Le Mécanisme cérébral de la pensée_. Paris, 1914.

[This is a study of the mechanism of the inspiration of poets and

writers of romance.]

(20) Chabaneix, Paul. _Physiologie cérébrale_. Le subconscient chez les

artistes, les savants, et les écrivains. 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'Année 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 für

Ethnographie_, VII (1894), 232-37.

(6) Waitz, Theodor, und Gerland, Georg. _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_,

VI, 343-63. 6 vols. Leipzig, 1862-77.

(7) Tuchmann, J. "La Fascination," _Mélusine_, 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, É. "La prohibition de l'inceste et ses origines," _L'Année

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'Année 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 légendes_. 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; genèse-évolution_.

Paris, 1911. [Discusses the formation of public opinion, trends, etc.]

(4) Bauer, Wilhelm. _Die öffentliche Meinung und ihre geschichtlichen

Grundlagen_. Tübingen, 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 idées," _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 für 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'état.

Translated by J. Gaure. Paris, 1898.

(3) Duguit, Léon. _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. _Rechtsverhältnisse von eingeborenen Völkern 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.