Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/275

SOCIAL CONTROL 261 forefathers the blight of evil example, we set no one in stocks or pillory, veil decently our prisons and prison-discipline from the common gaze, avoid public executions, forbid brutal exhibitions, stamp out the fighting of cocks, dogs, bulls, or men, look after the treatment of car or cab horses, restrict vivisection, confine prostitutes to the back streets, keep our saloons away from the churches and the schoolhouses, and suppress open drunkenness as a public scandal. Furthermore we exact from our public men, as a price of their leadership, a private life that shall offer no stone of stumbling to the foot of weak imitators. The publicity that illumines for the multitude the habits and doings of those in high places compels a close scrutiny of their private as well as their public conduct, and a prompt disowning of those whose example is a danger to the public morale.

The suggestion of word is no less an object of concern than the contagion of deed. Our public places have been so looked after that from one end of a great thoroughfare to another we find nothing to remind of vice or crime. From the pulpit, on the platform, in all meetings and social gatherings, it is a grave offense to speak save sparingly and in way of condemnation of aught but that which is pure and of good report. One can trace the purgation more and more clearly as personal relations become social relations. Where two or three are gathered the tongue wags freely. Before twenty, in the sewing circle or the lodge room, one stammers and thinks of the morals of his neighbors. Before a hundred the social cloture is in full operation, and to an audience mingled of both sexes and all ages it is always the pontiff and not the man that speaks.

The daily newspaper, in its catering to ever-widening classes has often become mere printed street gossip, quite oblivious to any suggestive effect. But the recurring agitation for the purifying of the press and the growing clamor for an endowed newspaper, herald the day when judicious selection of news will be exercised in the interest of social morality. Some years ago Mr. Howells complained that American fiction was hobbled because our magazines were constructed always with reference to