Chapter XII

SOCIAL CONTROL

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Social Control Defined

Social control has been studied, but, in the wide extension that sociology has given to the term, it has not been defined. All social problems turn out finally to be problems of social control. In the introductory chapter to this volume social problems were divided into three classes: Problems (a) of administration, (b) of policy and polity, (c) of social forces and human nature.[250] Social control may be studied in each one of these categories. It is with social forces and human nature that sociology is mainly concerned. Therefore it is from this point of view that social control will be considered in this chapter.

In the four preceding chapters the process of interaction, in its four typical forms, competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, has been analyzed and described. The community and the natural order within the limits of the community, it appeared, are an effect of competition. Social control and the mutual subordination of individual members to the community have their origin in conflict, assume definite organized forms in the process of accommodation, and are consolidated and fixed in assimilation.

Through the medium of these processes, a community assumes the form of a society. Incidentally, however, certain definite and quite spontaneous forms of social control are developed. These forms are familiar under various titles: tradition, custom, folkways, mores, ceremonial, myth, religious and political beliefs, dogmas and creeds, and finally public opinion and law. In this chapter it is proposed to define a little more accurately certain of these typical mechanisms through which social groups are enabled to act. In the chapter on "Collective Behavior" which follows, materials will be presented to exhibit the group in action.

It is in action that the mechanisms of control are created, and the materials under the title "Collective Behavior" are intended to illustrate the stages, (a) social unrest, (b) mass movements, (c) institutions in which society is formed and reformed. Finally, in the chapter on "Progress," the relation of social change to social control will be discussed and the rôle of science and collective representations in the direction of social changes indicated.

The most obvious fact about social control is the machinery by which laws are made and enforced, that is, the legislature, the courts, and the police. When we think of social control, therefore, these are the images in which we see it embodied and these are the terms in which we seek to define it.

It is not quite so obvious that legislation and the police must, in the long run, have the support of public opinion. Hume's statement that governments, even the most despotic, have nothing but opinion to support them, cannot be accepted without some definition of terms, but it is essentially correct. Hume included under opinion what we would distinguish from it, namely, the mores. He might have added, using opinion in this broad sense, that the governed, no matter how numerous, are helpless unless they too are united by "opinion."

A king or a political "boss," having an army or apolitical "machine" at his command, can do much. It is possible, also, to confuse or mislead public opinion, but neither the king nor the boss will, if he be wise, challenge the mores and the common sense of the community.

Public opinion and the mores, however, representing as they do the responses of the community to changing situations, are themselves subject to change and variation. They are based, however, upon what we have called fundamental human nature, that is, certain traits which in some form or other are reproduced in every form of society.

During the past seventy years the various tribes, races, and nationalities of mankind have been examined in detail by the students of ethnology, and a comparison of the results shows that the fundamental patterns of life and behavior are everywhere the same, whether among the ancient Greeks, the modern Italians, the Asiatic Mongols, the Australian blacks, or the African Hottentots. All have a form of family life, moral and legal regulations, a religious system, a form of government, artistic practices, and so forth. An examination of the moral code of any given group, say the African Kaffirs, will disclose many identities with that of any other given group, say the Hebrews. All groups have such "commandments" as "Honor thy father and mother," "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal." Formerly it was assumed that this similarity was the result of borrowing between groups. When Bastian recorded a Hawaiian myth resembling the one of Orpheus and Eurydice, there was speculation as to how this story had been carried so far from Greece. But it is now recognized that similarities of culture are due, in the main, not to imitation, but to parallel development. The nature of man is everywhere essentially the same and tends to express itself everywhere in similar sentiments and institutions.[251]

There are factors in social control more fundamental than the mores. Herbert Spencer, in his chapter on "Ceremonial Government," has defined social control from this more fundamental point of view. In that chapter he refers to "the modified forms of action caused in men by the presence of their fellows" as a form of control "out of which other more definite controls are evolved." The spontaneous responses of one individual to the presence of another which are finally fixed, conventionalized, and transmitted as social ritual constitute that "primitive undifferentiated kind of government from which political and religious government are differentiated, and in which they continue immersed."

In putting this emphasis upon ceremonial and upon those forms of behavior which spring directly and spontaneously out of the innate and instinctive responses of the individual to a social situation, Spencer is basing government on the springs of action which are fundamental, so far, at any rate, as sociology is concerned.

2. Classification of the Materials

The selections on social control have been classified under three heads: (a) elementary forms of social control, (b) public opinion, and (c) institutions. This order of the readings indicates the development of control from its spontaneous forms in the crowd, in ceremony, prestige, and taboo; its more explicit expression in gossip, rumor, news, and public opinion; to its more formal organization in law, dogma, and in religious and political institutions. Ceremonial, public opinion, and law are characteristic forms in which social life finds expression as well as a means by which the actions of the individual are co-ordinated and collective impulses are organized so that they issue in behavior, that is, either (a) primarily expressive—play, for example—or (b) positive action.

A very much larger part of all human behavior than we ordinarily imagine is merely expressive. Art, play, religious exercises, and political activity are either wholly or almost wholly forms of expression, and have, therefore, that symbolic and ceremonial character which belongs especially to ritual and to art, but is characteristic of every activity carried on for its own sake. Only work, action which has some ulterior motive or is performed from a conscious sense of duty, falls wholly and without reservation into the second class.

a) Elementary forms of social control.—Control in the crowd, where rapport is once established and every individual is immediately responsive to every other, is the most elementary form of control.

Something like this same direct and spontaneous response of the individual in the crowd to the crowd's dominant mood or impulse may be seen in the herd and the flock, the "animal crowd."

Under the influence of the vague sense of alarm, or merely as an effect of heat and thirst, cattle become restless and begin slowly moving about in circles, "milling." This milling is a sort of collective gesture, an expression of discomfort or of fear. But the very expression of the unrest tends to intensify its expression and so increases the tension in the herd. This continues up to the point where some sudden sound, the firing of a pistol or a flash of lightning, plunges the herd into a wild stampede.

Milling in the herd is a visible image of what goes on in subtler and less obvious ways in human societies. Alarms or discomforts frequently provoke social unrest. The very expression of this unrest tends to magnify it. The situation is a vicious circle. Every attempt to deal with it merely serves to aggravate it. Such a vicious circle we witnessed in our history from 1830 to 1861, when every attempt to deal with slavery served only to bring the inevitable conflict between the states nearer. Finally there transpired what had for twenty years been visibly preparing and the war broke.

Tolstoi in his great historical romance, War and Peace, describes, in a manner which no historian has equaled, the events that led up to the Franco-Russian War of 1812, and particularly the manner in which Napoleon, in spite of his efforts to avoid it, was driven by social forces over which he had no control to declare war on Russia, and so bring about his own downfall.

The condition under which France was forced by Bismarck to declare war on Prussia in 1870, and the circumstances under which Austria declared war on Serbia in 1914 and so brought on the world-war, exhibit the same fatal circle. In both cases, given the situation, the preparations that had been made, the resolutions formed and the agreements entered into, it seems clear that after a certain point had been reached every move was forced.

This is the most fundamental and elementary form of control. It is the control exercised by the mere play of elemental forces. These forces may, to a certain extent, be manipulated, as is true of other natural forces; but within certain limits, human nature being what it is, the issue is fatally determined, just as, given the circumstances and the nature of cattle, a stampede is inevitable. Historical crises are invariably created by processes which, looked at abstractly, are very much like milling in a herd. The vicious circle is the so-called "psychological factor" in financial depressions and panics and is, indeed, a factor in all collective action.

The effect of this circular form of interaction is to increase the tensions in the group and, by creating a state of expectancy, to mobilize its members for collective action. It is like the attention in the individual: it is the way in which the group prepares to act.

Back of every other form of control—ceremonial, public opinion, or law—there is always this interaction of the elementary social forces. What we ordinarily mean by social control, however, is the arbitrary intervention of some individual—official, functionary, or leader—in the social process. A policeman arrests a criminal, an attorney sways the jury with his eloquence, the judge passes sentence; these are the familiar formal acts in which social control manifests itself. What makes the control exercised in this way social, in the strict sense of that term, is the fact that these acts are supported by custom, law, and public opinion.

The distinction between control in the crowd and in other forms of society is that the crowd has no tradition. It has no point of reference in its own past to which its members can refer for guidance. It has therefore neither symbols, ceremonies, rites, nor ritual; it imposes no obligations and creates no loyalties.

Ceremonial is one method of reviving in the group a lively sense of the past. It is a method of reinstating the excitements and the sentiments which inspired an earlier collective action. The savage war dance is a dramatic representation of battle and as such serves to rouse and reawaken the warlike spirit. This is one way in which ceremonial becomes a means of control. By reviving the memories of an earlier war, it mobilizes the warriors for a new one.

Ernst Grosse, in The Beginnings of Art, has stated succinctly what has impressed all first-hand observers, namely, the important rôle which the dance plays in the lives of primitive peoples.

The dances of the hunting peoples are, as a rule, mass dances. Generally the men of the tribe, not rarely the members of several tribes, join in the exercises, and the whole assemblage then moves according to one law in one time. All who have described the dances have referred again and again to this "wonderful" unison of the movements. In the heat of the dance the several participants are fused together as into a single being, which is stirred and moved as by one feeling. During the dance they are in a condition of complete social unification, and the dancing group feels and acts like a single organism. The social significance of the primitive dance lies precisely in this effect of social unification. It brings and accustoms a number of men who, in their loose and precarious conditions of life, are driven irregularly hither and thither by different individual needs and desires, to act under one impulse with one feeling for one object. It introduces order and connection, at least occasionally, into the rambling, fluctuating life of the hunting tribes. It is, besides wars, perhaps the only factor that makes their solidarity vitally perceptible to the adherents of a primitive tribe, and it is at the same time one of the best preparations for war, for the gymnastic dances correspond in more than one respect to our military exercises. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the primitive dance in the culture development of mankind. All higher civilization is conditioned upon the uniformly ordered co-operation of individual social elements, and primitive men are trained to this co-operation by the dance.[252]

The dance, which is so characteristic and so universal a feature of the life of primitive man—at once a mode of collective expression and of collective representation—is but a conventionalized form of the circular reaction, which in its most primitive form is represented by the milling of the herd.

b) Public opinion.—We ordinarily think of public opinion as a sort of social weather. At certain times, and under certain circumstances, we observe strong, steady currents of opinion, moving apparently in a definite direction and toward a definite goal. At other times, however, we note flurries and eddies and counter-currents in this movement. Every now and then there are storms, shifts, or dead calms. These sudden shifts in public opinion, when expressed in terms of votes, are referred to by the politicians as "landslides."

In all these movements, cross-currents and changes in direction which a closer observation of public opinion reveals, it is always possible to discern, but on a much grander scale, to be sure, that same type of circular reaction which we have found elsewhere, whenever the group was preparing to act. Always in the public, as in the crowd, there will be a circle, sometimes wider, sometimes narrower, within which individuals are mutually responsive to motives and interests of one another, so that out of this interplay of social forces there may emerge at any time a common motive and a common purpose that will dominate the whole.

Within the circle of the mutual influence described, there will be no such complete rapport and no such complete domination of the individual by the group as exists in a herd or a crowd in a state of excitement, but there will be sufficient community of interest to insure a common understanding. A public is, in fact, organized on the basis of a universe of discourse, and within the limits of this universe of discourse, language, statements of fact, news will have, for all practical purposes, the same meanings. It is this circle of mutual influence within which there is a universe of discourse that defines the limits of the public.

A public like the crowd is not to be conceived as a formal organization like a parliament or even a public meeting. It is always the widest area over which there is conscious participation and consensus in the formation of public opinion. The public has not only a circumference, but it has a center. Within the area within which there is participation and consensus there is always a focus of attention around which the opinions of the individuals which compose the public seem to revolve. This focus of attention, under ordinary circumstances, is constantly shifting. The shifts of attention of the public constitute what is meant by the changes in public opinion. When these changes take a definite direction and have or seem to have a definite goal, we call the phenomenon a social movement. If it were possible to plot this movement in the form of maps and graphs, it would be possible to show movement in two dimensions. There would be, for example, a movement in space. The focus of public opinion, the point namely at which there is the greatest "intensity" of opinion, tends to move from one part of the country to another.[253] In America these movements, for reasons that could perhaps be explained historically, are likely to be along the meridians, east and west, rather than north and south. In the course of this geographical movement of public opinion, however, we are likely to observe changes in intensity and changes in direction (devagation).

Changes in intensity seem to be in direct proportion to the area over which opinion on a given issue may be said to exist. In minorities opinion is uniformly more intense than it is in majorities and this is what gives minorities so much greater influence in proportion to their numbers than majorities. While changes in intensity have a definite relation to the area over which public opinion on an issue may be said to exist, the devagations of public opinion, as distinguished from the trend, will probably turn out to have a direct relation to the character of the parties that participate. Area as applied to public opinion will have to be measured eventually in terms of social rather than geographical distance, that is to say, in terms of isolation and contact. The factor of numbers is also involved in any such calculation. Geographical area, communication, and the number of persons involved are in general the factors that would determine the concept "area" as it is used here. If party spirit is strong the general direction or trend of public opinion will probably be intersected by shifts and sudden transient changes in direction, and these shifts will be in proportion to the intensity of the party spirit. Charles E. Merriam's recent study of political parties indicates that the minority parties formulate most of the legislation in the United States.[254] This is because there is not very great divergence in the policies of the two great parties and party struggles are fought out on irrelevant issues. So far as this is true it insures against any sudden change in policy. New legislation is adopted in response to the trend of public opinion, rather than in response to the devagations and sudden shifts brought about by the development of a radical party spirit.

All these phenomena may be observed, for example, in the Prohibition Movement. Dicey's study of Law and Public Opinion in England showed that while the direction of opinion in regard to specific issues had been very irregular, on the whole the movement had been in one general direction. The trend of public opinion is the name we give to this general movement. In defining the trend, shifts, cross-currents, and flurries are not considered. When we speak of the tendency or direction of public opinion we usually mean the trend over a definite period of time.

When the focus of public attention ceases to move and shift, when it is fixed, the circle which defines the limits of the public is narrowed. As the circle narrows, opinion itself becomes more intense and concentrated. This is the phenomenon of crisis. It is at this point that the herd stampedes.

The effect of crisis is invariably to increase the dangers of precipitate action. The most trivial incident, in such periods of tension, may plunge a community into irretrievable disaster. It is under conditions of crisis that dictatorships are at once possible and necessary, not merely to enable the community to act energetically, but in order to protect the community from the mere play of external forces. The manner in which Bismarck, by a slight modification of the famous telegram of Ems, provoked a crisis in France and compelled Napoleon III, against his judgment and that of his advisers, to declare war on Germany, is an illustration of this danger.[255]

It is this narrowing of the area over which a definite public opinion may be said to exist that at once creates the possibility and defines the limits of arbitrary control, so far as it is created or determined by the existence of public opinion.

Thus far the public has been described almost wholly in terms that could be applied to a crowd. The public has been frequently described as if it were simply a great crowd, a crowd scattered as widely as news will circulate and still be news.[256] But there is this difference. In the heat and excitement of the crowd, as in the choral dances of primitive people, there is for the moment what may be described as complete fusion of the social forces. Rapport has, for the time being, made the crowd, in a peculiarly intimate way, a social unit.

No such unity exists in the public. The sentiment and tendencies which we call public opinion are never unqualified expressions of emotion. The difference is that public opinion is determined by conflict and discussion, and made up of the opinions of individuals not wholly at one. In any conflict situation, where party spirit is aroused, the spectators, who constitute the public, are bound to take sides. The impulse to take sides is, in fact, in direct proportion to the excitement and party spirit displayed. The result is, however, that both sides of an issue get considered. Certain contentions are rejected because they will not stand criticism. Public opinion formed in this way has the character of a judgment, rather than a mere unmeditated expression of emotion, as in the crowd. The public is never ecstatic. It is always more or less rational. It is this fact of conflict, in the form of discussion, that introduces into the control exercised by public opinion the elements of rationality and of fact.

In the final judgment of the public upon a conflict or an issue, we expect, to be sure, some sort of unanimity of judgment, but in the general consensus there will be some individual differences of opinion still unmediated, or only partially so, and final agreement of the public will be more or less qualified by all the different opinions that co-operated to form its judgment.

In the materials which follow a distinction is made between public opinion and the mores, and this distinction is important. Custom and the folkways, like habit in the individual, may be regarded as a mere residuum of past practices. When folkways assume the character of mores, they are no longer merely matters of fact and common sense, they are judgments upon matters which were probably once live issues and as such they may be regarded as the products of public opinion.

Ritual, religious or social, is probably the crystallization of forms of behavior which, like the choral dance, are the direct expression of the emotions and the instincts. The mores, on the other hand, in so far as they contain a rational element, are the accumulations, the residuum, not only of past practices, but of judgments such as find expression in public opinion. The mores, as thus conceived, are the judgments of public opinion in regard to issues that have been settled and forgotten.

L. T. Hobhouse, in his volume, Morals in Evolution, has described, in a convincing way, the process by which, as he conceives it, custom is modified and grows under the influence of the personal judgments of individuals and of the public. Public opinion, as he defines it, is simply the combined and sublimated judgments of individuals.

Most of these judgments are, to be sure, merely the repetition of old formulas. But occasionally, when the subject of discussion touches us more deeply, when it touches upon some matter in which we have had a deeper and more intimate experience, the ordinary patter that passes as public opinion is dissipated and we originate a moral judgment that not only differs from, but is in conflict with, the prevailing opinion. In that case "we become, as it were, centers from which judgments of one kind or another radiate and from which they pass forth to fill the atmosphere of opinion and take their place among the influences that mould the judgments of men."

The manner in which public opinion issues from the interaction of individuals, and moral judgments are formed that eventually become the basis of law, may be gathered from the way in which the process goes on in the daily life about us.

No sooner has the judgment escaped us—a winged word from our own lips—than it impinges on the judgment similarly flying forth to do its work from our next-door neighbor, and if the subject is an exciting one the air is soon full of the winged forces clashing, deflecting or reinforcing one another as the case may be, and generally settling down toward some preponderating opinion which is society's judgment on the case. But in the course of the conflict many of the original judgments are modified. Discussion, further consideration, above all, the mere influence of our neighbour's opinion reacts on each of us, with a stress that is proportioned to various mental and moral characteristics of our own, our clearness of vision, our firmness, or, perhaps, obstinacy of character, our self-confidence, and so forth. Thus, the controversy will tend to leave its mark, small or great, on those who took part in it. It will tend to modify their modes of judgment, confirming one, perhaps, in his former ways, shaping the confidence of another, opening the eyes of a third. Similarly, it will tend to set a precedent for future judgments. It will affect what men say and think on the next question that turns up. It adds its weight, of one grain it may be, to some force that is turning the scale of opinion and preparing society for some new departure. In any case, we have here in miniature at work every day before our eyes the essential process by which moral judgments arise and grow.[257]

c) Institutions.—An institution, according to Sumner, consists of a concept and a structure. The concept defines the purpose, interest, or function of the institution. The structure embodies the idea of the institution and furnishes the instrumentalities through which the idea is put into action. The process by which purposes, whether they are individual or collective, are embodied in structures is a continuous one. But the structures thus formed are not physical, at least not entirely so. Structure, in the sense that Sumner uses the term, belongs, as he says, to a category of its own. "It is a category in which custom produces continuity, coherence, and consistency, so that the word 'structure' may properly be applied to the fabric of relations and prescribed positions with which functions are permanently connected." Just as every individual member of a community participates in the process by which custom and public opinion are made, so also he participates in the creation of the structure, that "cake of custom" which, when it embodies a definite social function, we call an institution.

Institutions may be created just as laws are enacted, but only when a social situation exists to which they correspond will they become operative and effective. Institutions, like laws, rest upon the mores and are supported by public opinion. Otherwise they remain mere paper projects or artefacts that perform no real function. History records the efforts of conquering peoples to impose upon the conquered their own laws and institutions. The efforts are instructive, but not encouraging. The most striking modern instance is the effort of King Leopold of Belgium to introduce civilization into the Congo Free State.[258]

Law, like public opinion, owes its rational and secular character to the fact that it arose out of an effort to compromise conflict and to interpret matters which were in dispute.

To seek vengeance for a wrong committed was a natural impulse, and the recognition of this fact in custom established it not merely as a right but as a duty. War, the modern form of trial by battle, the vendetta, and the duel are examples that have survived down to modern times of this natural and primitive method of settling disputes.

In all these forms of conflict custom and the mores have tended to limit the issues and define the conditions under which disputes might be settled by force. At the same time public opinion, in passing judgment on the issues, exercised a positive influence on the outcome of the struggle.

Gradually, as men realized the losses which conflicts incurred, the community has intervened to prevent them. At a time when the blood feud was still sanctioned by the mores, cities of refuge and sanctuaries were established to which one who had incurred a blood feud might flee until his case could be investigated. If it then appeared that the wrong committed had been unintentional or if there were other mitigating circumstances, he might find in the sanctuary protection. Otherwise, if a crime had been committed in cold blood, "lying in wait," or "in enmity," as the ancient Jewish law books called it, he might be put to death by the avenger of blood, "when he meeteth him."[259]

Thus, gradually, the principle became established that the community might intervene, not merely to insure that vengeance was executed in due form, but to determine the facts, and thus courts which determined by legal process the guilt or innocence of the accused were established.

It does not appear that courts of justice were ever set up within the kinship group for the trial of offenses, although efforts were made there first of all, by the elders and the headmen, to compromise quarrels and compose differences.

Courts first came into existence, the evidence indicates, when society was organized over wider areas and after some authority had been established outside of the local community. As society was organized over a wider territory, control was extended to ever wider areas of human life until we have at present a program for international courts with power to intervene between nations to prevent wars.[260]

Society, like the individual man, moves and acts under the influence of a multitude of minor impulses and tendencies which mutually interact to produce a more general tendency which then dominates all the individuals of the group. This explains the fact that a group, even a mere casual collection of individuals like a crowd, is enabled to act more or less as a unit. The crowd acts under the influence of such a dominant tendency, unreflectively, without definite reference to a past or a future. The crowd has no past and no future. The public introduces into this vortex of impulses the factor of reflection. The public presupposes the existence of a common impulse such as manifests itself in the crowd, but it presupposes, also, the existence of individuals and groups of individuals representing divergent tendencies. These individuals interact upon one another critically. The public is, what the crowd is not, a discussion group. The very existence of discussion presupposes objective standards of truth and of fact. The action of the public is based on a universe of discourse in which things, although they may and do have for every individual somewhat different value, are describable at any rate in terms that mean the same to all individuals. The public, in other words, moves in an objective and intelligible world.

Law is based on custom. Custom is group habit. As the group acts it creates custom. There is implicit in custom a conception and a rule of action, which is regarded as right and proper in the circumstances. Law makes this rule of action explicit. Law grows up, however, out of a distinction between this rule of action and the facts. Custom is bound up with the facts under which the custom grew up. Law is the result of an effort to frame the rule of action implicit in custom in such general terms that it can be made to apply to new situations, involving new sets of facts. This distinction between the law and the facts did not exist in primitive society. The evolution of law and jurisprudence has been in the direction of an increasingly clearer recognition of this distinction between law and the facts. This has meant in practice an increasing recognition by the courts of the facts, and a disposition to act in accordance with them. The present disposition of courts, as, for example, the juvenile courts, to call to their assistance experts to examine the mental condition of children who are brought before them and to secure the assistance of juvenile-court officers to advise and assist them in the enforcement of the law, is an illustration of an increasing disposition to take account of the facts.

The increasing interest in the natural history of the law and of legal institutions, and the increasing disposition to interpret it in sociological terms, from the point of view of its function, is another evidence of the same tendency.

II. MATERIALS

A. ELEMENTARY FORMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL

1. Control in the Crowd and the Public[261]

In August, 1914, I was a cowboy on a ranch in the interior of British Columbia. How good a cowboy I would not undertake to say, because if there were any errands off the ranch the foreman seemed better able to spare me for them than anyone else in the outfit.

One ambition, and one only, possessed me in those days. And it was not to own the ranch! All in the world I wanted was to accumulate money enough to carry me to San Francisco when the Panama exposition opened in the autumn. After that I didn't care. It would be time enough to worry about another job when I had seen the fair.

Ordinarily I was riding the range five days in the week. Saturdays I was sent on a 35-mile round trip for the mail. It was the most delightful day of them all for me. The trail lay down the valley of the Fraser and although I had been riding it for months it still wove a spell over me that never could be broken. Slipping rapidly by as though escaping to the sea from the grasp of the hills that hemmed it in on all sides, the river always fascinated me. It was new every time I reached its edge.

An early Saturday morning in August found me jogging slowly along the trail to Dog Creek. Dog Creek was our post-office and trading-center. This morning, however, my mind was less on the beauties of the Fraser than on the Dog Creek hotel. Every week I had my dinner there before starting in mid-afternoon on my return to the ranch, and this day had succeeded one of misunderstanding with "Cookie" wherein all the boys of our outfit had come off second-best. I was hungry and that dinner at the hotel was going to taste mighty good. Out there on the range we had heard rumors of a war in Europe. We all talked it over in the evening and decided it was another one of those fights that were always starting in the Balkans. One had just been finished a few months before and we thought it was about time another was under way, so we gave the matter no particular thought. But when I got within sight of Dog Creek I knew something was up. The first thing I heard was that somebody had retreated from Mons and that the Germans were chasing them. So, the Germans were fighting anyway. Then a big Indian came up to me as I was getting off my pony and told me England's big white chief was going to war, or had gone, he wasn't certain which, but he was going too. Would I?

I laughed at him. "What do you mean, go to war?" I asked him.

I wasn't English; I wasn't Canadian. I was from the good old U.S.A. and from all we could understand the States were neutral. So, I reasoned, I ought to be neutral too, and I went in to see what there might be to eat.

There was plenty of excitement in the dining-room. Under its influence I began to look at the thing in a different light. While I was an alien, I had lived in Canada. I had enjoyed her hospitality. Much of my education was acquired in a Canadian school. Canadians were among my dearest friends. Some of these very fellows, there in Dog Creek, were "going down" to enlist.

All the afternoon we argued about it. Politics, economics, diplomacy; none of them entered into the question. In fact we hadn't the faintest idea what the war was all about. Our discussion hinged solely on what we, personally, ought to do. England was at war. She had sent out a call to all the Empire for men; for help. Dog Creek heard and was going to answer that call. Even if I were an alien I had been in that district for more than a year and I owed it to Dog Creek and the district to join up with the rest. By that time I wanted to go. I was crazy to go! It would be great to see London and maybe Paris and some of the other famous old towns—if the war lasted long enough for us to get over there. I began to bubble over with enthusiasm, just thinking about it. So I made an appointment with some of the boys for the next evening, rode back to the ranch and threw the mail and my job at the foreman.

A week later we were in Vancouver. Then things began to get plainer—to some of the fellows. We heard of broken treaties, "scraps of paper," "Kultur," the rights of nations, big and small, "freedom of the seas," and other phrases that meant less than nothing to most of us. It was enough for me, then, that the country which had given me the protection of its laws wanted to help England. I trusted the government to know what it was doing. Before we were in town an hour we found ourselves at a recruiting office. By the simple expedient of moving my birthplace a few hundred miles north I became a Canadian and a member of the expeditionary force—a big word with a big meaning. Christmas came and I was in a well-trained battalion of troops with no more knowledge of the war than the retreat from Mons, the battles of the Marne and the Aisne, and an occasional newspaper report of the capture of a hundred thousand troops here and a couple of hundred thousand casualties somewhere else. We knew, at that rate, it couldn't possibly last until we got to the other side, but we prayed loudly that it would. In April we heard of the gassing of the first Canadians at Ypres. Then the casualty lists from that field arrived and hit Vancouver with a thud. Instantly a change came over the city. Before that day, war had been a romance, a thing far away about which to read and over which to wave flags. It was intangible, impersonal. It was the same attitude the States exhibited in the autumn of '17. Then suddenly it became real. This chap and that chap; a neighbor boy, a fellow from the next block or the next desk. Dead! Gassed! This was war; direct, personal, where you could count the toll among your friends. Personally, I thought that what the Germans had done was a terrible thing and I wondered what kind of people they might be that they could, without warning, deliver such a foul blow. In a prize ring the Kaiser would have lost the decision then and there. We wondered about gas and discussed it by the hour in our barracks. Some of us, bigger fools than the rest, insisted that the German nation would repudiate its army. But days went by and nothing of the kind occurred. It was then I began to take my soldiering a little more seriously. If a nation wanted to win a war so badly that it would damn its good name forever by using means ruled by all humanity as beyond the bounds of civilized warfare, it must have a very big object in view. And I started—late it is true—to obtain some clue to those objects.

May found us at our port of embarkation for the voyage to England. The news of the "Lusitania" came over the wires and that evening our convoy steamed. For the first time, I believe, I fully realized I was a soldier in the greatest war of all the ages.

Between poker, "blackjack," and "crown and anchor" with the crew, we talked over the two big things that had happened in our soldier lives—gas and the "Lusitania." And to these we later added liquid fire.

Our arguments, our logic, may have been elemental, but I insist they struck at the root. I may sum them up thus: Germany was not using the methods of fighting that could be countenanced by a civilized nation. As the nation stood behind its army in all this barbarism, there must be something inherently lacking in it despite its wonderful music, its divine poetry, its record in the sciences. It, too, must be barbarian at heart. We agreed that if it should win this war it would be very uncomfortable to belong to one of the allied nations, or even to live in the world at all, since it was certain German manners and German methods would not improve with victory. And we, as a battalion, were ready to take our places in France to back up our words with deeds.

A week or so later we landed in England. A marked change had come over the men since the day we left Halifax. Then most of us regarded the whole war, or our part in it, as more or less of a lark. On landing we were still for a lark, but something else had come into our consciousness. We were soldiers fighting for a cause—a cause clear cut and well defined—the saving of the world from a militarily mad country without a conscience. At our camp in England we saw those boys of the first division who had stood in their trenches in front of Ypres one bright April morning and watched with great curiosity a peculiar looking bank of fog roll toward them from the enemy's line. It rolled into their trenches, and in a second those men were choking and gasping for breath. Their lungs filled with the rotten stuff, and they were dying by dozens in the most terrible agony, beating off even as they died a part of the "brave" Prussian army as it came up behind those gas clouds; came up with gas masks on and bayonets dripping with the blood of men lying on the ground fighting, true, but for breath. A great army, that Prussian army! And what a "glorious" victory! Truly should the Hun be proud! So far as I am concerned, Germany did not lose the war at the battle of the Marne, at the Aisne, or at the Yser. She lost it there at Ypres, on April 22, 1915. It is no exaggeration when I say our eagerness to work, to complete our training, to learn how to kill, so we could take our places in the line, and help fight off those mad people, grew by the hour. They stiffened our backs and made us fighting mad. We saw what they had done to our boys from Canada; they and their gas. The effect on our battalion was the effect on the whole army, and, I am quite sure, on the rest of the world. They put themselves beyond the pale. They compelled the world to look on them as mad dogs, and to treat them as mad dogs. We trained in England until August, when we went to France. To all outward appearances we were still happy, carefree soldiers, all out for a good time. We were happy! We were happy we were there, and down deep there was solid satisfaction, not on account of the different-colored books that were issuing from every chancellory in Europe, but from a feeling rooted in white men's hearts, backed by the knowledge of Germany's conduct, that we were there in a righteous cause. Our second stop in our march toward the line was a little village which had been occupied by the Boches in their mad dash toward Paris. Our billet was a farm just on the edge of the village. The housewife permitted us in her kitchen to do our cooking, at the same time selling us coffee. We stayed there two or three days and became quite friendly with her, even if she did scold us for our muddy boots. Two pretty little kiddies played around the house, got in the way, were scolded and spanked and in the next instant loved to death by Madame. Then she would parade them before a picture of a clean-cut looking Frenchman in the uniform of the army, and say something about "après la guerre." In a little crib to one side of the room was a tiny baby, neglected by Madame, except that she bathed and fed it. The neglect was so pronounced that our curiosity was aroused. The explanation came through the estaminet gossip, and later from Madame herself. A Hun captain of cavalry had stayed there a few days in August, '14, and not only had he allowed his detachment full license in the village, but had abused his position in the house in the accustomed manner of his bestial class. As Madame told us her story; how her husband had rushed off to his unit with the first call for reserves, leaving her alone with two children, and how the blond beast had come, our fists clenched and we boiled with rage. That is German war! but it is not all. What will be the stories that come out of what is now occupied France? This Frenchwoman's story was new to us then, but, like other things in the war, as we moved through the country it became common enough, with here and there a revolting detail more horrible than anything we had heard before.

Now and then Germany expresses astonishment at the persistence of the British and the French. They are a funny people, the Germans. There are so many things they do not, perhaps cannot, understand. They never could understand why Americans, such as myself, who enlisted in a spirit of adventure, and with not a single thought on the justice of the cause, could experience such a marked change of feeling as to regard this conflict as the most holy crusade in which a man could engage. It is a holy crusade! Never in the history of the world was the cause of right more certainly on the side of an army than it is today on the side of the allies: We who have been through the furnace of France know this. I only say what every other American who has been fighting under an alien flag said when our country came in: "Thank God we have done it. Some boy, Wilson, believe me!"

2. Ceremonial Control[262]

If, disregarding conduct that is entirely private, we consider only that species of conduct which involves direct relations with other persons; and if under the name government we include all control of conduct, however arising; then we must say that the earliest kind of government, the most general kind of government, and the government which is ever spontaneously recommencing, is the government of ceremonial observance. This kind of government, besides preceding other kinds, and besides having in all places and times approached nearer to universality of influence, has ever had, and continues to have, the largest share in regulating men's lives.

Proof that the modifications of conduct called "manners" and "behavior" arise before those which political and religious restraints cause is yielded by the fact that, besides preceding social evolution, they precede human evolution: they are traceable among the higher animals. The dog afraid of being beaten comes crawling up to his master clearly manifesting the desire to show submission. Nor is it solely to human beings that dogs use such propitiatory actions. They do the like one to another. All have occasionally seen how, on the approach of some formidable Newfoundland or mastiff, a small spaniel, in the extremity of its terror, throws itself on its back with legs in the air. Clearly then, besides certain modes of behavior expressing affection, which are established still earlier in creatures lower than man, there are established certain modes of behavior expressing subjection.

After recognizing this fact, we shall be prepared to recognize the fact that daily intercourse among the lowest savages, whose small loose groups, scarcely to be called social, are without political or religious regulation, is under a considerable amount of ceremonial regulation. No ruling agency beyond that arising from personal superiority characterizes a horde of Australians; but every such horde has imperative observances. Strangers meeting must remain some time silent; a mile from an encampment approach has to be heralded by loud cooeys; a green bough is used as an emblem of peace; and brotherly feeling is indicated by exchange of names. Ceremonial control is highly developed in many places where other forms of control are but rudimentary. The wild Comanche "exacts the observance of his rules of etiquette from strangers," and "is greatly offended" by any breach of them. When Araucanians meet, the inquiries, felicitations, and condolences which custom demands are so elaborate that "the formality occupies ten or fifteen minutes."

That ceremonial restraint, preceding other forms of restraint, continues ever to be the most widely diffused form of restraint we are shown by such facts as that in all intercourse between members of each society, the decisively governmental actions are usually prefaced by this government of observances. The embassy may fail, negotiation may be brought to a close by war, coercion of one society by another may set up wider political rule with its peremptory commands; but there is habitually this more general and vague regulation of conduct preceding the more special and definite. So within a community acts of relatively stringent control coming from ruling agencies, civil and religious, begin with and are qualified by this ceremonial control which not only initiates but in a sense envelops all other. Functionaries, ecclesiastical and political, coercive as their proceedings may be, conform them in large measure to the requirements of courtesy. The priest, however arrogant his assumption, makes a civil salute; and the officer of the law performs his duty subject to certain propitiatory words and movements.

Yet another indication of primordialism may be named. This species of control establishes itself anew with every fresh relation among individuals. Even between intimates greetings signifying continuance of respect begin each renewal of intercourse. And in the presence of a stranger, say in a railway carriage, a certain self-restraint, joined with some small act like the offer of a newspaper, shows the spontaneous rise of a propitiatory behavior such as even the rudest of mankind are not without. So that the modified forms of action caused in men by the presence of their fellows constitute that comparatively vague control out of which other more definite controls are evolved—the primitive undifferentiated kind of government from which the political and religious governments are differentiated, and in which they ever continue immersed.

3. Prestige[263]

Originally prestige—here, too, etymology proves to be an enfant terrible—means delusion. It is derived from the Latin praestigiae (-arum)—though it is found in the forms praestigia (-ae) and praestigium (-ii) too: the juggler himself (dice-player, rope-walker, "strong man," etc.) was called praestigiator (-oris). Latin authors and mediaeval writers of glossaries took the word to mean "deceptive juggling tricks," and, as far as we know, did not use it in its present signification. The praestigiator threw dice or put coins on a table, then passed them into a small vessel or box, moved the latter about quickly and adroitly, till finally, when you thought they were in a certain place, the coins turned up somewhere else: "The looker-on is deceived by such innocent tricks, being often inclined to presume the sleight of hand to be nothing more or less than magic art."

The practice of French writers in the oldest times was, so far as we have been able to discover, to use the word prestige at first in the signification above assigned to the Latin "praestigiae" (prestige, prestigiateur, -trice, prestigieux). The use of the word was not restricted to the prestige of prophets, conjurers, demons, but was transferred by analogy to delusions the cause of which is not regarded any longer as supernatural. Diderot actually makes mention of the prestige of harmony. The word "prestige" became transfigured, ennobled, and writers and orators refined it so as to make it applicable to analogies of the remotest character. Rousseau refers to the prestige of our passions, which dazzles the intellect and deceives wisdom. Prestige is the name continually given to every kind of spell, the effect of which reminds us of "prestige" ("cet homme exerce une influence que rassemble à une prestige"—Littre), and to all magic charms and attractive power which is capable of dulling the intellect while it enhances sensation. We may read of the prestige of fame, of the power which, in default of prestige, is brute force; in 1869 numberless placards proclaimed through the length and breadth of Paris that Bourbeau, Minister of Public Instruction, though reputed to be a splendid lawyer, "lacked prestige"—"Bourbeau manque de prestige." The English and German languages make use of the word in the latter meaning as opposed to the imaginary virtue of the conjurer; the same signification is applied, generally speaking, to the Italian and Spanish prestigio, only that the Italian prestigiáo and the Spanish prestigiador, just like the French prestigiateur, have, as opposed to the more recent meaning, kept the older significance; neither of them means anything more or less than conjurer or juggler.

The market clown, the rope-walker, the sword-swallower, the reciter of long poems, the clever manipulator who defies imitation—all possess prestige: but on the other hand, prestige surrounds demoniacal spells, wizardry, and all effectiveness not comprehensible by logic.

We state something of someone when we say that he possesses prestige; but our statement is not clear, and the predicate cannot be distinguished from the subject. Of what is analysable, well-known, commonplace, or what we succeed in understanding thoroughly, in attaining or imitating, we do not say that it possesses prestige.

What is the relation between prestige and prejudice? When what is unintelligible, or mysterious, is at one time received with enthusiasm, at another with indignation, what renders necessary these two extreme sentiments of appreciation which, though appearing under apparently identical circumstances, are diametrically opposed to one another?

The most general form of social prejudice is that of race. A foreigner is received with prejudice, conception, or prestige. If we put "conception" aside, we find prejudice and prestige facing one another. We see this split most clearly demonstrated if we observe the differences of conduct in the reception of strangers by primitive peoples. In Yrjö Hirn's Origins of Art we are told that those travellers who have learned the tongues of savages have often observed that their persons were made the subjects of extemporized poems by the respective savages. Sometimes these verses are of a derisive character; at other times they glorify the white man. When do they deride, when glorify?

Where strong prejudice values are present, as in the case of Negroes, every conception of equality and nationalism incorporated in the statute-book is perverted. All that appears permanently divergent is made the subject of damnatory prejudice; and the more apparent and seeming, the more primitive the impression that restrains, the more general the prejudice; smell affects more keenly than form, and form more than mode of thought. If a member of a nation is not typical, but exercises an exclusive, personal impression on us, he possesses prestige; if he is typical, he is indifferent to us, or we look down upon him and consider him comical. To sum up: the stranger whom we feel to be divergent as compared with ourselves is indifferent or the object of prejudice; the stranger whom we feel ourselves unable to measure by our own standard, whose measure—not his qualities—we feel to be different, we receive with prestige. We look with prejudice on the stranger whom we dissociate, and receive with prestige the stranger who is dissociated.

Even in the animal world we come across individuals consistently treated with deference, of which, in his work on the psychical world of animals, Perty has plenty to tell us: "Even in the animal world," he says, "there are certain eminent individuals, which in comparison with the other members of their species show a superiority of capability, brain power, and force of will, and obtain a predominance over the other animals." Cuvier observed the same in the case of a buck which had only one horn; Grant tells us of a certain ourang-outang which got the upper hand of the rest of the monkeys and often threatened them with the stick; from Naumann we hear of a clever crane which ruled over all the domestic animals and quickly settled any quarrels that arose among them. Far more important than these somewhat obscure observations is the peculiar social mechanism of the animal world to be found in the mechanical following of the leaders of flocks and herds. But this obedience is so conspicuously instinctive, so genuine, and so little varying in substance and intensity, that it can hardly be identified with prestige. Bees are strong royalists; but the extent to which their selection of a queen is instinctive and strictly exclusive is proved by the fact that the smell of a strange queen forced on them makes them hate her; they kill her or torture her—though the same working bees prefer to die of hunger rather than allow their own queen to starve.

Things are radically changed when animals are brought face to face with man. Some animals sympathize with men, and like to take part in their hunting and fighting, as the dog and the horse; others subject themselves as a result of force. Consequently men have succeeded in domesticating a number of species of animals. It is here that we find the first traces, in the animal world, of phenomena, reactions of conduct in the course of development, which, to a certain extent, remind us of the reception of prestige. The behaviour of a dog, says Darwin, which returns to its master after being absent—or the conduct of a monkey, when it returns to its beloved keeper—is far different from what these animals display towards beings of the same order as themselves. In the latter case the expressions of joy seem to be somewhat less demonstrative, and all their actions evince a feeling of equality. Even Professor Braubach declares that a dog looks upon its master as a divine person. Brehm gives us a description of the tender respect shown towards his children by a chimpanzee that had been brought to his home and domesticated. "When we first introduced my little six-weeks-old daughter to him," he says, "at first he regarded the child with evident astonishment, as if desirous to convince himself of its human character, then touched its face with one finger with remarkable gentleness, and amiably offered to shake hands. This trifling characteristic, which I observed in the case of all chimpanzees reared in my house, is worthy of particular emphasis, because it seems to prove that our man-monkey descries and pays homage to that higher being, man, even in the tiniest child. On the other hand, he by no means shows any such friendly feelings towards creatures like himself—not even towards little ones."

In every stage of the development of savage peoples we come across classical examples of mock kings—of the "primus inter pares," "duces ex virtute," not "ex nobilitate reges"—of rational and valued leaders. The savages of Chile elect as their chief the man who is able to carry the trunk of a tree farthest. In other places, military prowess, command of words, crafts, a knowledge of spells are the causal sources of the usually extremely trifling homage due to the chieftain. "Savage hordes in the lowest stage of civilization are organized, like troops of monkeys, on the basis of authority. The strongest old male by virtue of his strength acquires a certain ascendancy, which lasts as long as his physical strength is superior to that of every other male...."

Beyond that given by nature, primitive society recognizes no other prestige, for the society of savages lacks the subjective conditions of prestige—settlement in large numbers and permanency. The lack of distance compels the savage to respect only persons who hold their own in his presence: this conspicuous clearness of the estimation of primitive peoples is the cause that has prevailed on us to dwell so long on this point. That the cause of this want of prestige among savages is the lack of concentration in masses, not any esoteric peculiarity, is proved by the profound psychological appreciation of the distances created by nature, and still more by the expansion of tribal life into a barbarian one. The tenfold increase of the number of a tribe renders difficult a logical, ethical, or aesthetic selection of a leader, as well as an intuitive control of spells and superstitions.

The dramatic mise en scène of human prestige coincides with the first appearance of this concentration in masses, and triumphs with its triumph.

4. Prestige and Status in South East Africa[264]

In no other land under the British flag, except, perhaps, in the Far East, certainly in none of the great self-governing colonies with which we rank ourselves, is the position of white man qua white man so high, his status so impugnable, as in South East Africa. Differing in much else, the race instinct binds the whites together to demand recognition as a member of the ruling and inviolable caste, even for the poorest, the degraded of their race. And this position connotes freedom from all manual and menial toil; without hesitation the white man demands this freedom, without question the black man accedes and takes up the burden, obeying the race command of one who may be his personal inferior. It is difficult to convey to one who has never known this distinction the way in which the very atmosphere is charged with it in South East Africa. A white oligarchy, every member of the race an aristocrat; a black proletariat, every member of the race a server; the line of cleavage as clear and deep as the colours. The less able and vigorous of our race, thus protected, find here an ease, a comfort, a recognition to which their personal worth would never entitle them in a homogeneous white population.

When uncontaminated by contact with the lower forms of our civilization, the native is courteous and polite. Even today, changed for the worse as he is declared to be by most authorities, a European could ride or walk alone, unarmed even with a switch, all through the locations of Natal and Zululand, scores of miles away from the house of any white man, and receive nothing but courteous deference from the natives. If he met, as he certainly would, troops of young men, dressed in all their barbaric finery, going to wedding or dance, armed with sticks and shields, full of hot young blood, they would still stand out of the narrow path, giving to the white man the right of way and saluting as he passed. I have thus travelled alone all over South East Africa, among thousands of blacks and never a white man near, and I cannot remember the natives, even if met in scores or hundreds, ever disputing the way for a moment. All over Africa, winding and zigzagging over hill and dale, over grassland and through forest, from kraal to kraal, and tribe to tribe, go the paths of the natives. In these narrow paths worn in the grass by the feet of the passers, you could travel from Natal to Benguela and back again to Mombasa. Only wide enough for one to travel thereon, if opposite parties meet one must give way; cheerfully, courteously, without cringing, often with respectful salute, does the native stand on one side allowing the white man to pass. One accepts it without thought; it is the expected, but if pondered upon it is suggestive of much.

5. Taboo[265]

Rules of holiness in the sense just explained, i.e., a system of restrictions on man's arbitrary use of natural things, enforced by the dread of supernatural penalties, are found among all primitive peoples. It is convenient to have a distinct name for this primitive institution, to mark it off from the later developments of the idea of holiness in advanced religions, and for this purpose the Polynesian term "taboo" has been selected. The field covered by taboos among savage and half-savage races is very wide, for there is no part of life in which the savage does not feel himself to be surrounded by mysterious agencies and recognise the need of walking warily. Moreover all taboos do not belong to religion proper, that is, they are not always rules of conduct for the regulation of man's contact with deities that, when taken in the right way, may be counted on as friendly, but rather appear in many cases to be precautions against the approach of malignant enemies—against contact with evil spirits and the like. Thus alongside of taboos that exactly correspond to rules of holiness, protecting the inviolability of idols and sanctuaries, priest and chiefs, and generally of all persons and things pertaining to the gods and their worship, we find another kind of taboo which in the Semitic field has its parallel in rules of uncleanness. Women after childbirth, men who have touched a dead body, and so forth, are temporarily taboo and separated from human society, just as the same persons are unclean in Semitic religion. In these cases the person under taboo is not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to the sanctuary as well as from contact with men; but his act or condition is somehow associated with supernatural dangers, arising, according to the common savage explanation, from the presence of formidable spirits which are shunned like an infectious disease. In most savage societies no sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo just indicated, and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch. Among the Syrians, for example, swine's flesh was taboo, but it was an open question whether this was because the animal was holy or because it was unclean. But though not precise, the distinction between what is holy and what is unclean is real; in rules of holiness the motive is respect for the gods, in rules of uncleanliness it is primarily fear of an unknown or hostile power, though ultimately, as we see in the Levitical legislation, the law of clean and unclean may be brought within the sphere of divine ordinances, on the view that uncleanness is hateful to God and must be avoided by all that have to do with Him.

The fact that all the Semites have rules of uncleanness as well as rules of holiness, that the boundary between the two is often vague, and that the former as well as the latter present the most startling agreement in point of detail with savage taboos, leaves no reasonable doubt as to the origin and ultimate relations of the idea of holiness. On the other hand, the fact that the Semites—or at least the northern Semites—distinguish between the holy and the unclean, marks a real advance above savagery. All taboos are inspired by awe of the supernatural, but there is a great moral difference between precautions against the invasion of mysterious hostile powers and precautions founded on respect for the prerogative of a friendly god. The former belong to magical superstition—the barrenest of all aberrations of the savage imagination—which, being founded only on fear, acts merely as a bar to progress and an impediment to the free use of nature by human energy and industry. But the restrictions on individual licence which are due to respect for a known and friendly power allied to man, however trivial and absurd they may appear to us in their details, contain within them germinant principles of social progress and moral order. To know that one has the mysterious powers of nature on one's side so long as one acts in conformity with certain rules, gives a man strength and courage to pursue the task of the subjugation of nature to his service. To restrain one's individual licence, not out of slavish fear, but from respect for a higher and beneficent power, is a moral discipline of which the value does not altogether depend on the reasonableness of sacred restrictions; an English schoolboy is subject to many unreasonable taboos, which are not without value in the formation of character. But finally, and above all, the very association of the idea of holiness with a beneficent deity, whose own interests are bound up with the interests of a community, makes it inevitable that the laws of social and moral order, as well as mere external precepts of physical observance, shall be placed under the sanction of the god of the community. Breaches of social order are recognised as offences against the holiness of the deity, and the development of law and morals is made possible, at a stage when human sanctions are still wanting, or too imperfectly administered to have much power, by the belief that the restrictions on human licence which are necessary to social well-being are conditions imposed by the god for the maintenance of a good understanding between himself and his worshippers.

Various parallels between savage taboos and Semitic rules of holiness and uncleanness will come before us from time to time; but it may be useful to bring together at this point some detailed evidences that the two are in their origin indistinguishable.

Holy and unclean things have this in common, that in both cases certain restrictions lie on men's use of and contact with them, and that the breach of these restrictions involves supernatural dangers. The difference between the two appears, not in their relation to man's ordinary life, but in their relation to the gods. Holy things are not free to man, because they pertain to the gods; uncleanness is shunned, according to the view taken in the higher Semitic religions, because it is hateful to the god, and therefore not to be tolerated in his sanctuary, his worshippers, or his land. But that this explanation is not primitive can hardly be doubted when we consider that the acts that cause uncleanness are exactly the same which among savage nations place a man under taboo, and that these acts are often involuntary, and often innocent, or even necessary to society. The savage, accordingly, imposes a taboo on a woman in childbed, or during her courses, and on the man who touches a corpse, not out of any regard for the gods, but simply because birth and everything connected with the propagation of the species on the one hand, and disease and death on the other, seem to him to involve the action of superhuman agencies of a dangerous kind. If he attempts to explain, he does so by supposing that on these occasions spirits of deadly power are present; at all events the persons involved seem to him to be sources of mysterious danger, which has all the characters of an infection and may extend to other people unless due precautions are observed. This is not scientific, but it is perfectly intelligible, and forms the basis of a consistent system of practice; whereas, when the rules of uncleanness are made to rest on the will of the gods, they appear altogether arbitrary and meaningless. The affinity of such taboos with laws of uncleanness comes out most clearly when we observe that uncleanness is treated like a contagion, which has to be washed away or otherwise eliminated by physical means. Take the rules about the uncleanness produced by the carcases of vermin in Lev. 11:32 ff.; whatever they touch must be washed; the water itself is then unclean, and can propagate the contagion; nay, if the defilement affect an (unglazed) earthen pot, it is supposed to sink into the pores, and cannot be washed out, so that the pot must be broken. Rules like this have nothing in common with the spirit of Hebrew religion; they can only be remains of a primitive superstition, like that of the savage who shuns the blood of uncleanness, and such like things, as a supernatural and deadly virus. The antiquity of the Hebrew taboos, for such they are, is shown by the way in which many of them reappear in Arabia; cf. for example Deut. 21:12, 13, with the Arabian ceremonies for removing the impurity of widowhood. In the Arabian form the ritual is of purely savage type; the danger to life that made it unsafe for a man to marry the woman was transferred in the most materialistic way to an animal, which it was believed generally died in consequence, or to a bird.

B. PUBLIC OPINION

1. The Myth[266]

There is no process by which the future can be predicted scientifically, nor even one which enables us to discuss whether one hypothesis about it is better than another; it has been proved by too many memorable examples that the greatest men have committed prodigious errors in thus desiring to make predictions about even the least distant future.

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.