Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/625

 SOCIAL CONTROL 609

Hindoo village, Maine says : " It is always the fact or the fiction that this council merely declares customary law."" For instance, the water supplied to village communities by government irriga- tion canals is distributed according to rules which "do not purport to emanate from the personal authority of their author or authors; nor do they assume to be dictated by a sense of equity ; there is always, I am assured, a sort of fiction, under which some customs as to the distribution of water are supposed to have existed from all antiquity, although in fact no artificial supply had been even so much as thought of."'

The halo of prestige is not always the hoar of antiquity. Tarde3 shows how epochs of custom-imitation alternate with periods of mode-imitation. For a while the course of imitation is between past and present ; then the current changes, and the course of imitation lies between contemporaries. To down- transmission or social heredity succeeds cross-imitation or con- ventionality. In the latter period the old is distrusted and the new has the presumption in its favor. In the former period the recent is weak, the presumption is with the ancient, and the maximum of statesmanship is to let things alone. It is in such an epoch that Wallenstein soliloquizes ;

" Power seated on a quiet throne thou'dst shake, Power on an ancient consecrated throne, Strong in possession, founded on old custom ; Power by a thousand tough and stringy roots Fixed to the people's pious nursery faith. This, this will be no strife of strength with strength. "<

We are in an innovating age, and the prestige of antiquity seems a slight thing to hold upright a law. But now, when all this is at a discount, it is well to remember with Sir H. Maine:

" It is indisputable that much the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved, since the moment when external completeness was first given to them by embodi- ment in some permanent record." '

■ Village Communities, p. 1 16. 'Ibid., p. no.

3 Les his de Vimitatton, chap. vii. ^ Ancient Law, p. 21.
 * The Piccolomini, scene iv.