Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/403

 SOCIAL CONTROL 389

not easy to keep from slipping back into the rut it wore for itself during the centuries it was the engine of a parasitic class.

The means whereby the minority can physically overpower and hold down the majority are many and well understood. They arm, train, and organize themselves as did the Spartans. Like the Normans they build themselves strongholds and castles. They girdle themselves with mercenaries as the princes of the old regime surrounded themselves with Swiss. They sow the seeds of enmity among their victims after the manner of the Hapsburgs in dealing with their subject peoples. They deprive them of weapons as the Spartans did the helots. Like the West India planters they prevent them from meeting, seeing, or communicating with one another. They keep them ignorant, fol- lowing the policy of the southern slave-owners. They cut off their natural leaders as did the Roman masters. They break their spirit with overwork. They terrorize them with cruelties. They keep them under constant surveillance, as in classic times the slaves on Sicilian estates were chained by day and penned underground by night. By such policies it has been found practi- cable for a parasitic band to hold down many times their number.

But this technique of coercion calls into being a counter- technique of freedom. In England, for instance, where the intruding Normans had brought the instruments of rule to a rare perfection, the industrial classes, long before they were able to master and use government for their own ends, had learned to safeguard themselves by hedging it with certain checks. With their acquired rights they built a rampart against the formidable engine in the hands of their spoilers. The right to bind law upon the sovereign, the right to forbid a standing army in time of peace, the right of citizens to assemble, to petition, to keep and bear arms, to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, to suffer only on trial and conviction, to be tried by their peers, and to be exempt from cruel or unusual punishments, availed to strip the class state of its most dreaded powers, and have justly come to be looked upon as the attributes of a free people. In this way force has become law, and might has been transmuted into right.