Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/778

762 business associates. The business man loses his credit, the merchant his customers, the lawyer his clients, the physician his patients, the clergyman his parish, the clerk his office, the laborer his job. The politician loses his nomination, the hotel keeper his guests, the editor his subscribers, the author his readers, a corporation its franchises. The boycott may go yet further. In small communities it is possible for tradesmen to refuse to sell an egg, a loaf or a candle to him who is under the ban. The result of all this is to shut out the breaker of social laws from the life of associated men and in the full tide of congregate life to condemn him to the isolation of the savage. One by one are severed the roots that spread into the social soil, supporting and sustaining the individual. One by one the breathing pores are sealed up, little by little the ligature is tightened till communication ceases, and the dead member drops from the social body. This system of slow suffocation is without the brute force implied by law, but its clemency is that of the priests who avoided the shedding of blood by using the stake and the faggot.

But the climax is reached when society invades the family of the offender. Though affection is a powerful bond in holding the family together, yet it is rarely the case that the actual relations of the members do not involve ideas as to rights and duties, support and loyalty, authority and obedience. In other words, the family relations do not spring wholly from natural feeling, but are in a measure shaped by certain ideals abroad in society and stamped with its authority upon the minds of the members of the household. But so far as this is true it is possible to reverse the signs and destroy these ties. If wife or child be impressively assured that the loyalty and obedience once a duty is now a sin, they may be detached from the wretched man who has incurred the extreme wrath of his fellows. When thus the nearest and dearest have recoiled in horror, when the evil doer has become an outcast, under the social ban, bereft of kith or kin and vouchsafed in the world of men only the bare rights the law guarantees to him, the full might of