Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/621

 SOCIAL CONTROL 605

It receives at the golden moment those ideas, precepts, pre- judices, and habits which are to become the foundation of its character. Thenceforth it is possible to organize the individual life, and to lay a solid basis for the social union by organizing the lives of many men about the same ideas and habits.

Whatever be the maximum, it is certain that the minimum exposure to family government and tradition lasts until the youth can assert his physical strength against that of the parent. The sure overlap of human generations reaches, therefore, to adolescence in both sexes, and from this period of kneading by authority and shaping by suggestion youth cannot escape. By so much as the first fifteen years dominate the rest of life can the traditions of the group dominate its members. Such is the contribution that the family makes to the social order.

Now, do these years really dominate ? Is social custom fixed in early habit powerful ? Does the life that is once built up about tradition stay so built ? Once the world's wisdom said "yes." If we hesitate to say it now, it is owing to the new phase we have entered. Nowadays no sooner does youth come forth with its life organized about certain ideas than we hasten to dis- organize it. After the young have got in the current of custom, they meet and are swung round by the rollers of fashion. Con- ventionality captivates them, and they cease imitating ancestors in order to imitate contemporaries. Moreover, culture and "the spirit of the age" bid them to drift no longer, but seize the helm themselves. But, after all, these new forces that break us out of the socket of custom are social and can be trusted. Besides, they have been active only in the handful of progressive societies. Throughout the story of the race it has been the normal thing for the social influence that bears on the adult to be one with the domestic influence that bears on the child.

The real question, then, is this: Can the clamping for fifteen years within the family and social order, and the early organiza- tion of life about the ideas presented by this order, afterward, avail against the wild and lawless impulses of the heart ? Of the answer to this there is no doubt. There is a powerful feeling which keeps the later years welded to the earlier. A kind of