Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/541

Rh of the community. On the other hand, it comes to be seen more or less clearly that greed, fraud, dishonesty, false testimony, unfaithfulness, hypocrisy, meanness, drunkenness, cruelty, vengefulness, insubordination, self indulgence and luxury, by leading to antagonism, collision, waste of energy and disappointment, lessen the worth of associated life, and so ought to be repressed with all the sanctions that can be marshaled. While it may take centuries of social experience to disclose to a group the conduct best for its ends, it is likely that, from the first, every effort on the part of the many to control the behavior of the individual will aim at some of the conditions here laid down.

This theory of the direction of control can be verified by examining the facts. The legal, social or moral codes actually enforced in a community express the social will, seeing they are collective products, and intended to regulate conduct. The study of these, therefore, reveals the direction of social control.

If we study undeveloped societies, we find no such formulations of the social will. If we study very advanced societies, we find the social will formulated into such general principles and abstract propositions that its true tendency does not appear on the surface. Moreover, as these ruling principles are entangled with systems of thought and made to appear of philosophical, theological or ethical validity, their derivation from the self interest of the group is not at once apparent. It is therefore necessary to examine codes at the moment of their greatest expansion, when the group will is registered, not in general formulas, but in a multitude of concrete commands.

Taking the Mosaic code, as an example, we find that the laws it contains can be classified as follows:

1. Laws in the interest of the individual observing them.

2. Laws in the interest of persons with whom the subject is in relation.

3. Laws in the interest of an indefinite body—the public.

4. Laws in the interest of the institutions of the community.

5. Laws in the interest of the system of belief which supplies the code with its chief sanction.