Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/489

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY 475

Ancient records, stories of travelers, investigations of ethnolo- gists, minute observation of contemporary nature peoples, have shed a flood of light on the development of the monogamic family as it is known to civilized nations.

Writers on jurisprudence have worked out the legal methods of regulating marriage, personal and property rights of spouses and children. Physiologists and physicians have made profound studies of the physical side of the marriage relation. Econo- mists have collected and exploited the budgets of families. Ethical writers have systematized the traditional beliefs and inherited convictions of modern society in regard to marriage duties and domestic virtues. In short, there is not a science or art which has not made a contribution to what may be called, and is sometimes called, a "domestic science." Yet, a "domes- tic science," as a branch of social technology, remains to be con- structed.

No better example can be chosen to illustrate the helpless- ness and inadequacy of a special science and its data, so long as those data stand isolated. The politician and legislator cannot draft a law, or an amendment to a law, with wisdom, until he has been taught in some way all the physical, intellectual, aesthetic, economic, ethical, and religious consequences of his statute. The moral and religious teacher is in precisely the same position. The parents, the school boards, the town meet- ing, the city council, are constantly acting, more or less blindly and instinctively, on the supposition that they know how their measures of discipline or instruction will affect all families in all their interests.

The materials for a division of social technology lie scattered about, and society sorely needs a systematic coordination and construction of them in a coherent body of regulative principles derived from critical investigation, and not from instinct and unreflecting acceptance of traditional beliefs.

A second example may be chosen in that form of com- munity, one of those designated by Professor F. H. Giddings as a " component society," which is called in common speech a " rural community."