Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/629

 SOCIAL CONTROL 613

Montaigne takes the same view :

" It is a very great doubt whether any so manifest benefit can accrue from the alteration of a law received, let it be what it will, as there is danger and inconvenience in altering it ; forasmuch as government is a structure com- posed of divers parts and members joined and united together with so strict connection that it is impossible to stir so much as one brick or stone but the whole body will be sensible of it." '

Says Hooker :

" What have we to induce men unto the willing obedience and observation of laws but the weight of so many men's judgment as have with deliberate advice assented thereunto ; the weight of that long experience which the world hath had thereof with consent and good liking ? "'

Bacon declares that "it is good also not to try experiments in states," and recommends :

" It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself, which, indeed, innovateth greatly, but quietly and by degrees, scarce to be perceived." '

And after him comes Burke, whose watchword was " pre- scription," and who thought "a sacred veil" should be drawn over the beginnings of all government.

We can now lay down the law that all imtitutioris having to do with coTVtrol change reluctantly, change slowly, cfuinge tardily, and change within sooner than without.

A second consequence of the spell of custom is that change in regulative institutions is masked when possible by fictions. In government we have the fiction of legitimation, by which usurpers are anointed from the holy ampulla ; the fiction of constitutional monarchy, whereby the leaders of parliament figure as advisers chosen by the king; and the fiction of the protectorate, by which, as in Egypt or Tunis, the real ruler is disguised as the minister resident of the protecting state. In law\v& have the Roman fiction that the praetors and jurisconsults were only interpreting the ancient Twelve Tables, whereas they were really developing law, and the English fiction that the decision of a judge only declares the common law, whereas it

' On Customs.

' Ecclesiastical Polity, Book IV, § 14.

3 Of Innovations.