Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/401

 SOCIAL CONTROL 387

or wrath out of which they grow ; while the means utilized by an exploiting class are the lifeless tools of cold-blooded policy, shaped by cunning, and achieving a control that is crude and repulsive.

Each of the well-marked classes that incline to parasitism has its favorite and characteristic means of control. Soldiers rely on physical force, and hence the rule of the military caste is characterized by brutality. Priests naturally avail themselves of superstition and fraud, and so their domination is marked by hypocrisy and craft. Nobles, after they have lost their military virtues and become chiefly ornamental, impress with pomp and show, and hence their rule is marked by pride and since only riches can keep up external splendor by rapacity. All control is consecrated by age, and becomes prescriptive. Hence every ruling class becomes in time exceedingly conservative.

But no single class is long allowed to sit alone in the seats of the mighty. Unless it shares with them its privileges and' advantages, other power-holders in society will combine for its overthrow. So there is a natural tendency for all power-holders to get together, sink their differences, and organize one great exploiting trust. As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages various social parasites appeared, one after the other lords of the soil, the princes, the papacy, the financiers. By playing off one parasitic interest against another, the free townsmen and the peasants shook off, for a time, their tormentors. But the princes and the rich townsmen, joining forces, ruined the lesser nobles and reduced the rest to loyal courtiers. By nationalizing the church, or by seizing ecclesiastical property and patronage, the princes then deprived the papacy of much of its power of prey- ing upon the rest of society, and compelled that close alliance of throne and altar which was so helpful to the growth of mon- archy. In France, before the Revolution, all the chief means of spoliation, the ownership of the soil, taxation, spiritual pre- rogatives, and finance contributed to feed a monstrous wen which was fastened by all ligaments that can attach a parasitic growth, and which drew to itself most of the juices in the social body.