Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/568

 554 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Prosperity, outrunning the growth of wants, softens the economic struggle. Long peace, melting down the tough masses cast in the iron mold of war, gives men the freedom of molecules in liquid.

What happens in such cases is just the opposite of that described above. Trammels of every kind moral, legal, religious relax, the greatest relief in this respect being enjoyed by those who handle the instruments of control. More- over, in this movement, as in the other, the changes are not anonymous. They are brought about, not directly by the social mind, but chiefly by those groups which are most cramped and which are pressing hardest against the yoke. They are the work of artists, laymen, the lower clergy, the teaching rank and file, the intellectuals, the civilians, the commoners. These find the very stars in their courses fighting with them in their struggle for relief.

Next to change in social need, the vicissitudes of control are connected with partial dissolution due to the rise and strife of classes. Normally "society" presents itself as a congeries of lesser and greater groups, an interlinking of narrower and wider circles, each playing its part in the task of control, each spinning some of the ties that bind persons into a social tissue. The outcome of these joint operations is social order. But there are times of ill health when these natural associations cease to lend one other confirmation and support. In the bosom of society there appear tangent groups, each having its distinctive public opinion, creed, personal ideals, moral standards, mass suggestions, and fascinating personalities in short, a more or less complete apparatus of control of its own. Groups of this sort are sects. When such sects are at variance with one another, the more absolute the control they exercise over their adherents the greater the strain on the social fabric.

The growth of fresh social tissue is in itself good. Like the budding of unicellular organisms, it is a sign of health, and when fission takes place it amounts to a kind of social reproduc- tion. In the course of this century hundreds of such embryo societies have formed on European soil, detached themselves, migrated to roomy America, and burst into vigorous life.