Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/567

 SOCIAL CONTROL 553

teaching is restricted, and more concern is shown for the sound- ness of professors than for their ability.

In the field of physical coercion there is an increase in the number of lictors, bailiffs, police, and soldiers told off to catch, prod, beat, and hold fast recalcitrants, and they are brought under a stricter discipline. They are more specialized for their work, and an esprit de corps is carefully cultivated among them. Executive and judicial officers are appointed rather than elected, and so made answerable to their superiors rather than to the people they work among. Locally chosen persons are displaced by the nominees of a central government. For the immediate control of the local community over the officials in its midst is substituted a general and remote control of the entire people over the whole governmental machine. The military becomes more independent of the civil power, the executive more inde- pendent of the legislature, the cabinet more independent of the party that supports it, the party organization more independent of the voter. The suffrage is restricted, or else its results are repeatedly decantered and filtered by means of degrees of election.

All this does not happen by simple fiat of the social will. Certain groups of persons executive, cabinet, the central gov- ernment, the party machine, the higher clergy, the educational hierarchy, "authorities" of every kind, in short are always striving for more power. When the need of a more stringent control makes itself felt they find the barriers to their self- aggrandizement unexpectedly giving way before them. For- merly they were held in check, while now they find encroachment strangely easy.

On the other hand there are certain deep-seated social changes which lessen the tension between man and man, and make for a milder discipline. Time assimilates juxtaposed races to one another and fits them to think and feel alike. Inventions make industry dynamic and the calcareous parts of the social organization are silently dissolved away. Changes in production or trade, lifting the base or depressing the apex of a conical society, purge out of control the element of class rule.