Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/521

 SOCIAL CONTROL 507

such demonstration as a handful of passion-led men who will not hearken to reason.

It is true that I desire my group strong and prosperous. It is true that the codes, legal and moral, define the conditions of this social well-being, and hence I wish them to be generally obeyed. But and now comes the thin ice in any particular instance the question is not, " What if this rule be abrogated ? " but, " What if I break it while others continue to obey it? " To have my way may mean much to me, may hurt society but little. Therefore I will transgress, hoping, however, for my own sake that the rest will not do the same. For the logical and consist- ent attitude of the self-seeker toward a beneficent social require- ment is to ignore it himself in the very moment of imposing it upon others.

Recently an assemblyman, who had induced his legislature to enact a law forbidding the dynamiting of streams, was found swooning by a mountain creek, one arm torn off by the prema- ture explosion of a dynamite cartridge. This violation of his own law throws into bold relief the contradiction between a man in his corporate capacity, judging, characterizing, and controlling the acts of individuals, and the same man in his private capacity, scheming to evade this control. Current ethics pronounces this legislator illogical, inconsistent, self-contradictory. He was none of these ; he was simply a hypocrite.

The solidarity plea, therefore, may be valid for the social man who needs it least, but not for the individualist to whom it is addressed. And if it influences him as undoubtedly it does it succeeds only because it leads him to confuse his status as member of the controlling group with his status as controlled individual. And it is, therefore, safe to urge against Nordau, and the optimists generally, that the solidarity of society, while yielding a scientific criterion of right and wrong, gives no irre- fragable reason to him who is not disposed to do the right. Their " firm foundation " for the good conduct of the future is a quaking bog of fallacy and illusion.