Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/517

 SOCIAL CONTROL 503

very noses. The fitting term for this, therefore, is not control by belief, but control by illusion. Of such illusions we can describe only a few leading types.

II.

Pseudo-consequence. This grows out of the method of Enlight- enment itself. The guardians of society, not content with enforcing their precepts with the genuine sanctions, often draw upon their imagination. It is so easy to exaggerate effects, to ignore exceptions, to overlook qualifying circumstances, to mar- shal fanciful consequences. Most moral instruction reeks with a disingenuousness which everybody excuses because it is salu- tary. A fine disregard for the real aftermath of heroic deeds and a shameless use of bugaboos to scare people away from the forbidden are everywhere the mark of the didactic. Sunday- school literature, for instance, plays fast and loose with the facts of life in its efforts to connect church-going with commercial prosperity, the memorizing of texts with worldly preferment, Sabbath-breaking with the gallows. It finds a mysterious causal relation between the robbing of orchards and the breaking of boughs, the Sunday sail and the capsizing boat. This rank growth of humbug for the young finally provokes the humorist to intervene with his " Story of an Ill-natured Boy," and his aphorism, " Be good and you will be lonesome."

Nor does the adult escape. It was Artemus Ward, with his " Moral Show," who satirized the American rage for edification. The social encouragement to pious fraud is seen in the tall exegesis of the biblical allusions to wine, that has become popular with us since the temperance movement. Much of the teaching as to the physiological effects of alcohol and narcotics is known to be merest rubbish. In literature romanticism, whatever troubles it heaps on the innocent, knows how to extricate them at the end and reward their virtue. Failure to do this is tragedy, and tragedy has no larger place with us than it had with the Greeks. Realism labors to banish cheap optimism, and to be at least as candid as the author of Job. But realism makes little