Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/703

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIE IV OF SOVEREIGNTY 687

transferred to the civil courts. Under these sovereign regulations the position of the wife has been advanced from "honorable servitude" to companionship and partnership. She is granted divorce, not only on account of adultery, but on account of cruelty and desertion ; she has a right to independent industry, to the ownership of property, to political suffrage, to the posses- sion of her children. The family, thus, through the extraction of the coercive sanctions, ceases to be a coercive institution and becomes a persuasive institution based on its own peculiar sanc- tion of love. Society has here branched out into two institu- tions, the one based on coercion and the other on sexual love. The coercive institution has taken to itself nearly all that per- tains to the structure and organization of the family. Organiza- tion, as we have seen, was based on the control of the coercive penalties, the power to punish, reward, promote, discharge, deprive ; and in extracting these penalties from the family the state becomes itself, as it were, the structure, with its legislative, judicial, and administrative organizations adapted for sustaining order and right, and in this structure the family proper lives. The vital principle of the family thus environed is not coercion, but affection. Affection is a purely psychic relation, whereas coercion depends on the control of external means. The family, thus deprived of these external props, is itself exalted to a clari- fied psychic principle and calls out, through mutual persuasion, in the individual characters of its partners those personal quali- ties and charms which strengthen, deepen, and ennoble the pas- sion itself.

In so far as there still remains an element of external depend- ence of the weaker and less privileged sex upon the stronger, there still remains an element of the original coercion which characterized the family. Polygamy, the direct control of women through coercive corporal sanctions, has been eliminated, but prostitution, the indirect control of women through the privative sanctions springing from control over their means of subsistence, has taken its place, and is, equally with the familv. its legal successor. Such direct inquiries as have been made seem to show that in but a small proportion of prostitutes is