Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/623

 SOCIAL CONTROL 607

incline them to order, when the parents had the element of order in their nature .... And they would naturally stamp upon their children and their children's children their own likings." '

It is, then, likely that custom will, among other things, trans- mit and fix attitudes of submission to elders, chiefs, and magis- trates, of obedience to precepts and laws, of subordination of private aims to the social order in which one has been reared.'

But to make custom, as such, a cause of order is to lend it a new and striking role. Custom has, it is true, received of late much attention as the source of early law. In its spirit the soci- ologist has seen the first dim realization of the conditions of social well-being. In its unwritten commands the jurist has seen the germ of written laws enforced by threat of punishment. So much for the content of custom. But the point I am making now is that this content is in a measure self-enforcing. We have learned to see in custom a primitive code obeyed out of super- stitious dread or fear of public opinion. I present it here as a power — and an ally and reinforcement of the other powers that bind the individual. The view needs but to be stated, for it has been foreshadowed by many thinkers. Such terms as "tyrant custom," 3 "venerable tyrant,"* "violent and treacherous school- mistress," ^ "principal magistrate of man's life,"* " greater power than nature,"^ "shifting sway,"' recognize a power, not merely an unwritten code.

The secret of this power must be sought, in the last analysis, in suggestion and habit. The child receives the ideas, precepts, and likings which are to become the organizing factors of its life, because it has no habits, because it is not yet obsessed by other ideas and feelings, because it wants something that may help it to bring order out of the chaotic contents of its mind, and because the hunger of a growing creature makes it greedy

' Lawi, III, 681.

' " The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom ; everyone having an inward veneration for the opinion and manners approved and received amongst his own people cannot without very great reluctance depart from them." (Montaigne, On Custom.)

3 Shakespeare. 5 Montaigne. 'Locke.

< Thomson. 'Bacon. 'Byron.