Page:Social Control (1901).djvu/24

 To many, no doubt, a survey of the foundations of social order will appear superfluous. Most of us take order for granted, and are hardly more aware of it than we are of the air we breathe. Order being the universal and indispensable condi- tion of all our social structures, we give no more thought to it than to the force of cohesion that keeps our machinery from flying into bits. Those to whom the fact is brought home by the persistence of a delinquent class assume, nevertheless, that the social fabric rests on a law-abiding disposition which is natural to all but the slant-browed few.

But it would be, in truth, much juster to assume a state of disorder. We ought to take for granted that men living in propinquity will continually fall afoul of one another. We ought to expect in the normal person not, it is true, the malice, lust, or ferocity of the born criminal, but certainly a natural unwillingness to be checked in the hot pursuit of his ends. Whenever men swarm in new places, — Dutch Flat, Kimberly, Siberia, Skagway, — the man-to-man struggle stands out naked and clear, and the slow emergence of order out of disorder and violence presents itself as the attainment of a difficult and artificial condition. Could we abstract from such communities the training received in older societies, the thrift that recognizes disorder as a blight upon prosperity, and the ready revolver which discourages aggression by equalizing men, we might arrive at a notion of the state in which the men of to-day, despite their high facial angle, would find themselves, if they were remanded to the zero point of social development.

Starting from this point, we must face the problem. By what means is the human struggle narrowed and limited ? How has violence been purged away from it ? How has the once brawling torrent