Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/824

 8 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The champions of each detail of regulation strive, therefore, to get these successive sanctions behind their commandments. The opponents of drinking, dancing, divorce, usury, horseracing, dueling, speculation, or prize fighting, strive to make the practices first blameworthy, then unlawful, then shameful, and finally sin- ful. But this massing of sanctions is very naturally resisted. The attempt to get God against a new vice, such as liquor selling, always encounters fierce opposition from those who find them- selves suddenly shut out from the odor of sanctity. New moral tests, like new party tests, endanger ground already won, and so imperil the sanctions for the major virtues. It is not well, therefore, to associate loss of honor with white lies or the Divine Displeasure with card playing. Sympathy, religious sentiment, self-respect, sense of duty, fear, regard for public opinion, enlightened self-interest each has its place and its task, and no one motive should be overworked.

The community draws no firm line between what offends it and what harms it. The ideals held up for imitation include table manners as well as honesty. Public disapproval must be faced by the non-conforming freethinker or dress-reformer as well as the swindler and the traitor. Religion claims its holy days and its fasts as well as just dealings. At times even the law becomes the instrument of a tyrannous majority. Codes, standards, and moral distinctions have crystallized out of col- lective feeling, and they will not draw a sharp line between pub- lic and private conduct unless collective feeling concerns itself exclusively with the collective interest. But this never occurs. The common resentment is never warden merely of the common welfare, but busies itself with sacrilege, profanity, sodomy, or cruelty to animals. It is thus that society comes to put its sanction behind the rules of private living, and even behind useless injunctions.

The margin of social control is a fluctuating margin. Just as law is always dying at some points and growing at others, so the requirements of public opinion or religion are ever changing. Society, while relinquishing its control over a man's Sundays,