Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/674

 660 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

brilliant, but far more enduring. A like change of method is taking place in the inner missions and social settlements dealing with the " cellars " and "swamps " of modern society.

The uplifting of the American negro is another field for the method of control by social valuations. It is now recognized that not churches alone will lift the race ; not even schools ; not even contact with the whites. But all of these cooperating with the wider means secured by efficient industry can do it. The growth of new wants, presided over by intelligence and culture, is the best lever for raising the status of the idle, quarreling, sensual, ravishing Afro-American. Certainly the infecting of the backward portion of the race with a high estimate of cleanli- ness, neatness, family privacy, domestic comfort, and literacy is an agent quite as moralizing as the dread of future punishments or the love of an ethical God.

The songs, ballads, proverbs, and tales that well up from the heart of the folk are instinct with a frank delight in meat and drink, in hues and sounds, in revel and song, in love and war, in freedom and danger. The native literature of Arab or Cossack or Magyar pictures his reigning pleasures with a naive veracity which startles while it charms the modern man. But when culture ceases to be local and volksthumlich and becomes national and central, this fidelity to fact and life is lost, and it becomes a wheel in the moral administration of society. Singer or sage may not thrive, save as he kotows to the notions that assist in moral government. In the country and the backwoods, in isolated rural communities and mountain settlements, the acknowledged inculcated estimates are shrewd and practical and racy of the soil. Here the values taught to sons and daughters spring most directly from the lives and experiences of the peo- ple, and, while lacking in the high-pitched idealism we find in the tideways of culture, do really rule the choices of those who profess them. But when this indigenous culture dies out, and each community becomes dependent on a national literature, art, philosophy, or religion, no longer rooted in popular life, the valuations it receives and supports drift ever farther from reality.