Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/667

 SOCIAL CONTROL 653

an appetite that might ravage his own family. The buccaneer will deprecate wassail and women till snug harbor is reached. The thief will still strive to impress his fellows with the pre- ciousness of class honor. The proposals men press upon one another are proposals for common enjoyment, and the pleasures they praise most are not those which sunder, but those which unite them. Brutal anti-social appraisals, therefore, like bad coins, are continually checked in circulation ; while the valua- tions that many may hold in common receive currency, indorse- ment, and furtherance.

The values that we hear on every lip are, therefore, those that have passed through a certain sifting. They have run the social gauntlet. They do not come from the overlappings of private estimates as a price results from a thousand private val- uations of buyers and sellers. They give us life as refracted in a social medium. It would not be too bold a metaphor to say that the social mind ruminating upon the appraisals cast into it arrives at certain valuations of human experience; and that these are social valuations, seeing they measure things from the standpoint of society and not from the standpoint of the indi- vidual. These collective appraisals of goods are ever in contact with private valuations, and are perpetually modified by them. So long as the "old Adam" rekindles in his descendants desires selfish or base, it is impossible for social valuations to rise clear of private judgments. But in any case their plane is higher, and so far as they influence man at all, they will draw him upward and fit him for society.

To this " spontaneous generation " of social values we must add the zeal of the tlitc of a people to press its desires, tastes, and moral opinions upon the rest. This is a factor by no means to be despised. According to one view the progress of a society in civilization resembles the trailing of an ill-organized proces- sion along the street quickstep at tlu- front, but the rear strag- gling out indefinitely. That is to say, advance takes place by the inherent power of the superior practice, belief, or want to overcome the inferior, and so passes from man to man, from class