Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/575

 SOCIAL CONTROL 561

movement, when men break away from home and family, village and custom, in order to swarm into El Dorados, into rising marts, or into industrial towns, there is a kind of moral inter- regnum. They have passed from the spell of the old, and the new grouping has not yet woven its spell. The city is sometimes an amorphous, uncohering horde of this kind, and so arises the legend that life in the city can only demoralize and egoize men. But the fact is that every association is able in time to loyalize and subdue its members to corporate ends. When men co ne into newly formed social classes, there is likewise a demoraliza- tion until traditions are formed. Old landed gentries, for example, love to contrast their fine sense of responsibility with the raw egoism of codfish aristocracies, bonanza kings, " swagger " sets, and other parvenu societies.

Chronic internecine strife by subjecting men to anti-social experiences rends the social web in which they have been enmeshed. "War," says Thucydides, "which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master, and tends to assimilate men's characters to their conditions." Of the bloody civil wars in Greece he goes on to say :

Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed : for there was no word binding enough nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure ; he must look to his own safety and could not afford to trust others. 1

The Thirty Years' War and the civil commotions in southern Europe early in this century merit a similar indictment. War, when it is the shock of great groups, brings the individual more under the sway of corporate aims. But when it enters all the intimate minor groupings of men, when it tears apart and dis- solves the family, the neighborhood, the church, and the social circle, then it converts the social man into the lone wolf.

The physiologist, in explaining the coordinating work of the human cerebellum, does not presume to account for those convul- sive, muscular contractions that follow a bayonet thrust or a

1 THUCYDIDES, Jowett's translation, III, chaps. 72, 73.