Introduction to the Science of Sociology

TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES

1. Race and Culture, and the Problem of the Relative Superiority and Inferiority of Races.

2. The Relation of Assimilation to Amalgamation.

3. The Mulatto as a Cultural Type.

4. Language as a Means of Assimilation and a Basis of National Solidarity.

5. History and Literature as Means for Preserving National Solidarity.

6. Race Prejudice and Segregation in Their Relations to Assimilation and Accommodation.

7. Domestic Slavery and the Assimilation of the Negro.

8. A Study of Historical Experiments in Denationalization; the Germanization of Posen, the Russianization of Poland, the Japanese Policy in Korea, etc.

9. The "Melting-Pot" versus "Hyphen" in Their Relation to Americanization.

10. A Study of Policies, Programs, and Experiments in Americanization from the Standpoint of Sociology.

11. The Immigrant Community as a Means of Americanization.

12. The Process of Assimilation as Revealed in Personal Documents, as Antin, The Promised Land; Rihbany, A Far Journey; Ravage, An American in the Making; etc.

13. Foreign Missions and Native Cultures.

14. The Rôle of Assimilation and Accommodation in the Personal Development of the Individual Man.

15. Assimilation and Accommodation in Their Relations to the Educational Process.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What do you understand Simons to mean by the term "assimilation"?

2. What is the difference between amalgamation and assimilation?

3. How are assimilation and amalgamation interrelated?

4. What do you consider to be the difference between Trotter's explanation of human evolution and that of Crile?

5. What do you understand Trotter to mean by the gregarious instinct as a mechanism controlling conduct?

6. Of what significance is the distinction made by Trotter between (a) the three individual instincts, and (b) the gregarious instincts?

7. What is the significance of material and non-material cultural elements for the study of race contact and intermixture?

8. How do you explain the difference in rapidity of assimilation of the various types of cultural elements?

9. What factors promoted and impeded the extension of Roman culture in Gaul?

10. What social factors were involved in the origin of the French language?

11. To what extent does the extension of a cultural language involve assimilation?

12. In what sense do the cultural languages compete with each other?

13. Do you agree with the prediction that within a century English will be the vernacular of a quarter of the people of the world? Justify your position.

14. Does Park's definition of assimilation differ from that of Simons?

15. What do you understand Park to mean when he says, "Social institutions are not founded in similarities any more than they are founded in differences, but in relations, and in the mutual interdependence of the parts"? What is the relation of this principle to the process of assimilation?

16. What do you understand to be the difference between the type of assimilation (a) that makes for group solidarity and corporate action, and (b) that makes for formal like-mindedness? What conditions favor the one or the other type of assimilation?

17. What do you understand by the term "Americanization"?

18. Is there a difference between Americanization and Prussianization?

19. With what programs of Americanization are you familiar? Are they adequate from the standpoint of the sociological interpretation of assimilation?

20. In what way is language both a means and a product of assimilation?

21. What is meant by the phrases "apperception mass," "universes of discourse," and "definitions of the situations"? What is their significance for assimilation?

22. In what way does assimilation involve the mediation of individual differences?

23. Does the segregation of immigrants make for or against assimilation?

24. In what ways do primary and secondary contacts, imitation and suggestion, competition, conflict and accommodation, enter into the process of assimilation?

CHAPTER XII

SOCIAL CONTROL

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Social Control Defined

Social control has been studied, but, in the wide extension that sociology has given to the term, it has not been defined. All social problems turn out finally to be problems of social control. In the introductory chapter to this volume social problems were divided into three classes: Problems (a) of administration, (b) of policy and polity, (c) of social forces and human nature.[250] Social control may be studied in each one of these categories. It is with social forces and human nature that sociology is mainly concerned. Therefore it is from this point of view that social control will be considered in this chapter.

In the four preceding chapters the process of interaction, in its four typical forms, competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, has been analyzed and described. The community and the natural order within the limits of the community, it appeared, are an effect of competition. Social control and the mutual subordination of individual members to the community have their origin in conflict, assume definite organized forms in the process of accommodation, and are consolidated and fixed in assimilation.

Through the medium of these processes, a community assumes the form of a society. Incidentally, however, certain definite and quite spontaneous forms of social control are developed. These forms are familiar under various titles: tradition, custom, folkways, mores, ceremonial, myth, religious and political beliefs, dogmas and creeds, and finally public opinion and law. In this chapter it is proposed to define a little more accurately certain of these typical mechanisms through which social groups are enabled to act. In the chapter on "Collective Behavior" which follows, materials will be presented to exhibit the group in action.

It is in action that the mechanisms of control are created, and the materials under the title "Collective Behavior" are intended to illustrate the stages, (a) social unrest, (b) mass movements, (c) institutions in which society is formed and reformed. Finally, in the chapter on "Progress," the relation of social change to social control will be discussed and the rôle of science and collective representations in the direction of social changes indicated.

The most obvious fact about social control is the machinery by which laws are made and enforced, that is, the legislature, the courts, and the police. When we think of social control, therefore, these are the images in which we see it embodied and these are the terms in which we seek to define it.

It is not quite so obvious that legislation and the police must, in the long run, have the support of public opinion. Hume's statement that governments, even the most despotic, have nothing but opinion to support them, cannot be accepted without some definition of terms, but it is essentially correct. Hume included under opinion what we would distinguish from it, namely, the mores. He might have added, using opinion in this broad sense, that the governed, no matter how numerous, are helpless unless they too are united by "opinion."

A king or a political "boss," having an army or apolitical "machine" at his command, can do much. It is possible, also, to confuse or mislead public opinion, but neither the king nor the boss will, if he be wise, challenge the mores and the common sense of the community.

Public opinion and the mores, however, representing as they do the responses of the community to changing situations, are themselves subject to change and variation. They are based, however, upon what we have called fundamental human nature, that is, certain traits which in some form or other are reproduced in every form of society.

There are factors in social control more fundamental than the mores. Herbert Spencer, in his chapter on "Ceremonial Government," has defined social control from this more fundamental point of view. In that chapter he refers to "the modified forms of action caused in men by the presence of their fellows" as a form of control "out of which other more definite controls are evolved." The spontaneous responses of one individual to the presence of another which are finally fixed, conventionalized, and transmitted as social ritual constitute that "primitive undifferentiated kind of government from which political and religious government are differentiated, and in which they continue immersed."

In putting this emphasis upon ceremonial and upon those forms of behavior which spring directly and spontaneously out of the innate and instinctive responses of the individual to a social situation, Spencer is basing government on the springs of action which are fundamental, so far, at any rate, as sociology is concerned.

2. Classification of the Materials

The selections on social control have been classified under three heads: (a) elementary forms of social control, (b) public opinion, and (c) institutions. This order of the readings indicates the development of control from its spontaneous forms in the crowd, in ceremony, prestige, and taboo; its more explicit expression in gossip, rumor, news, and public opinion; to its more formal organization in law, dogma, and in religious and political institutions. Ceremonial, public opinion, and law are characteristic forms in which social life finds expression as well as a means by which the actions of the individual are co-ordinated and collective impulses are organized so that they issue in behavior, that is, either (a) primarily expressive—play, for example—or (b) positive action.

A very much larger part of all human behavior than we ordinarily imagine is merely expressive. Art, play, religious exercises, and political activity are either wholly or almost wholly forms of expression, and have, therefore, that symbolic and ceremonial character which belongs especially to ritual and to art, but is characteristic of every activity carried on for its own sake. Only work, action which has some ulterior motive or is performed from a conscious sense of duty, falls wholly and without reservation into the second class.

a) Elementary forms of social control.—Control in the crowd, where rapport is once established and every individual is immediately responsive to every other, is the most elementary form of control.

Something like this same direct and spontaneous response of the individual in the crowd to the crowd's dominant mood or impulse may be seen in the herd and the flock, the "animal crowd."

Under the influence of the vague sense of alarm, or merely as an effect of heat and thirst, cattle become restless and begin slowly moving about in circles, "milling." This milling is a sort of collective gesture, an expression of discomfort or of fear. But the very expression of the unrest tends to intensify its expression and so increases the tension in the herd. This continues up to the point where some sudden sound, the firing of a pistol or a flash of lightning, plunges the herd into a wild stampede.

Milling in the herd is a visible image of what goes on in subtler and less obvious ways in human societies. Alarms or discomforts frequently provoke social unrest. The very expression of this unrest tends to magnify it. The situation is a vicious circle. Every attempt to deal with it merely serves to aggravate it. Such a vicious circle we witnessed in our history from 1830 to 1861, when every attempt to deal with slavery served only to bring the inevitable conflict between the states nearer. Finally there transpired what had for twenty years been visibly preparing and the war broke.

Tolstoi in his great historical romance, War and Peace, describes, in a manner which no historian has equaled, the events that led up to the Franco-Russian War of 1812, and particularly the manner in which Napoleon, in spite of his efforts to avoid it, was driven by social forces over which he had no control to declare war on Russia, and so bring about his own downfall.

The condition under which France was forced by Bismarck to declare war on Prussia in 1870, and the circumstances under which Austria declared war on Serbia in 1914 and so brought on the world-war, exhibit the same fatal circle. In both cases, given the situation, the preparations that had been made, the resolutions formed and the agreements entered into, it seems clear that after a certain point had been reached every move was forced.

This is the most fundamental and elementary form of control. It is the control exercised by the mere play of elemental forces. These forces may, to a certain extent, be manipulated, as is true of other natural forces; but within certain limits, human nature being what it is, the issue is fatally determined, just as, given the circumstances and the nature of cattle, a stampede is inevitable. Historical crises are invariably created by processes which, looked at abstractly, are very much like milling in a herd. The vicious circle is the so-called "psychological factor" in financial depressions and panics and is, indeed, a factor in all collective action.

The effect of this circular form of interaction is to increase the tensions in the group and, by creating a state of expectancy, to mobilize its members for collective action. It is like the attention in the individual: it is the way in which the group prepares to act.

Back of every other form of control—ceremonial, public opinion, or law—there is always this interaction of the elementary social forces. What we ordinarily mean by social control, however, is the arbitrary intervention of some individual—official, functionary, or leader—in the social process. A policeman arrests a criminal, an attorney sways the jury with his eloquence, the judge passes sentence; these are the familiar formal acts in which social control manifests itself. What makes the control exercised in this way social, in the strict sense of that term, is the fact that these acts are supported by custom, law, and public opinion.

The distinction between control in the crowd and in other forms of society is that the crowd has no tradition. It has no point of reference in its own past to which its members can refer for guidance. It has therefore neither symbols, ceremonies, rites, nor ritual; it imposes no obligations and creates no loyalties.

Ceremonial is one method of reviving in the group a lively sense of the past. It is a method of reinstating the excitements and the sentiments which inspired an earlier collective action. The savage war dance is a dramatic representation of battle and as such serves to rouse and reawaken the warlike spirit. This is one way in which ceremonial becomes a means of control. By reviving the memories of an earlier war, it mobilizes the warriors for a new one.

Ernst Grosse, in The Beginnings of Art, has stated succinctly what has impressed all first-hand observers, namely, the important rôle which the dance plays in the lives of primitive peoples.

The dance, which is so characteristic and so universal a feature of the life of primitive man—at once a mode of collective expression and of collective representation—is but a conventionalized form of the circular reaction, which in its most primitive form is represented by the milling of the herd.

b) Public opinion.—We ordinarily think of public opinion as a sort of social weather. At certain times, and under certain circumstances, we observe strong, steady currents of opinion, moving apparently in a definite direction and toward a definite goal. At other times, however, we note flurries and eddies and counter-currents in this movement. Every now and then there are storms, shifts, or dead calms. These sudden shifts in public opinion, when expressed in terms of votes, are referred to by the politicians as "landslides."

In all these movements, cross-currents and changes in direction which a closer observation of public opinion reveals, it is always possible to discern, but on a much grander scale, to be sure, that same type of circular reaction which we have found elsewhere, whenever the group was preparing to act. Always in the public, as in the crowd, there will be a circle, sometimes wider, sometimes narrower, within which individuals are mutually responsive to motives and interests of one another, so that out of this interplay of social forces there may emerge at any time a common motive and a common purpose that will dominate the whole.

Within the circle of the mutual influence described, there will be no such complete rapport and no such complete domination of the individual by the group as exists in a herd or a crowd in a state of excitement, but there will be sufficient community of interest to insure a common understanding. A public is, in fact, organized on the basis of a universe of discourse, and within the limits of this universe of discourse, language, statements of fact, news will have, for all practical purposes, the same meanings. It is this circle of mutual influence within which there is a universe of discourse that defines the limits of the public.

A public like the crowd is not to be conceived as a formal organization like a parliament or even a public meeting. It is always the widest area over which there is conscious participation and consensus in the formation of public opinion. The public has not only a circumference, but it has a center. Within the area within which there is participation and consensus there is always a focus of attention around which the opinions of the individuals which compose the public seem to revolve. This focus of attention, under ordinary circumstances, is constantly shifting. The shifts of attention of the public constitute what is meant by the changes in public opinion. When these changes take a definite direction and have or seem to have a definite goal, we call the phenomenon a social movement. If it were possible to plot this movement in the form of maps and graphs, it would be possible to show movement in two dimensions. There would be, for example, a movement in space. The focus of public opinion, the point namely at which there is the greatest "intensity" of opinion, tends to move from one part of the country to another.[253] In America these movements, for reasons that could perhaps be explained historically, are likely to be along the meridians, east and west, rather than north and south. In the course of this geographical movement of public opinion, however, we are likely to observe changes in intensity and changes in direction (devagation).

All these phenomena may be observed, for example, in the Prohibition Movement. Dicey's study of Law and Public Opinion in England showed that while the direction of opinion in regard to specific issues had been very irregular, on the whole the movement had been in one general direction. The trend of public opinion is the name we give to this general movement. In defining the trend, shifts, cross-currents, and flurries are not considered. When we speak of the tendency or direction of public opinion we usually mean the trend over a definite period of time.

When the focus of public attention ceases to move and shift, when it is fixed, the circle which defines the limits of the public is narrowed. As the circle narrows, opinion itself becomes more intense and concentrated. This is the phenomenon of crisis. It is at this point that the herd stampedes.

The effect of crisis is invariably to increase the dangers of precipitate action. The most trivial incident, in such periods of tension, may plunge a community into irretrievable disaster. It is under conditions of crisis that dictatorships are at once possible and necessary, not merely to enable the community to act energetically, but in order to protect the community from the mere play of external forces. The manner in which Bismarck, by a slight modification of the famous telegram of Ems, provoked a crisis in France and compelled Napoleon III, against his judgment and that of his advisers, to declare war on Germany, is an illustration of this danger.[255]

It is this narrowing of the area over which a definite public opinion may be said to exist that at once creates the possibility and defines the limits of arbitrary control, so far as it is created or determined by the existence of public opinion.

Thus far the public has been described almost wholly in terms that could be applied to a crowd. The public has been frequently described as if it were simply a great crowd, a crowd scattered as widely as news will circulate and still be news.[256] But there is this difference. In the heat and excitement of the crowd, as in the choral dances of primitive people, there is for the moment what may be described as complete fusion of the social forces. Rapport has, for the time being, made the crowd, in a peculiarly intimate way, a social unit.

No such unity exists in the public. The sentiment and tendencies which we call public opinion are never unqualified expressions of emotion. The difference is that public opinion is determined by conflict and discussion, and made up of the opinions of individuals not wholly at one. In any conflict situation, where party spirit is aroused, the spectators, who constitute the public, are bound to take sides. The impulse to take sides is, in fact, in direct proportion to the excitement and party spirit displayed. The result is, however, that both sides of an issue get considered. Certain contentions are rejected because they will not stand criticism. Public opinion formed in this way has the character of a judgment, rather than a mere unmeditated expression of emotion, as in the crowd. The public is never ecstatic. It is always more or less rational. It is this fact of conflict, in the form of discussion, that introduces into the control exercised by public opinion the elements of rationality and of fact.

In the final judgment of the public upon a conflict or an issue, we expect, to be sure, some sort of unanimity of judgment, but in the general consensus there will be some individual differences of opinion still unmediated, or only partially so, and final agreement of the public will be more or less qualified by all the different opinions that co-operated to form its judgment.

In the materials which follow a distinction is made between public opinion and the mores, and this distinction is important. Custom and the folkways, like habit in the individual, may be regarded as a mere residuum of past practices. When folkways assume the character of mores, they are no longer merely matters of fact and common sense, they are judgments upon matters which were probably once live issues and as such they may be regarded as the products of public opinion.

Ritual, religious or social, is probably the crystallization of forms of behavior which, like the choral dance, are the direct expression of the emotions and the instincts. The mores, on the other hand, in so far as they contain a rational element, are the accumulations, the residuum, not only of past practices, but of judgments such as find expression in public opinion. The mores, as thus conceived, are the judgments of public opinion in regard to issues that have been settled and forgotten.

L. T. Hobhouse, in his volume, Morals in Evolution, has described, in a convincing way, the process by which, as he conceives it, custom is modified and grows under the influence of the personal judgments of individuals and of the public. Public opinion, as he defines it, is simply the combined and sublimated judgments of individuals.

Most of these judgments are, to be sure, merely the repetition of old formulas. But occasionally, when the subject of discussion touches us more deeply, when it touches upon some matter in which we have had a deeper and more intimate experience, the ordinary patter that passes as public opinion is dissipated and we originate a moral judgment that not only differs from, but is in conflict with, the prevailing opinion. In that case "we become, as it were, centers from which judgments of one kind or another radiate and from which they pass forth to fill the atmosphere of opinion and take their place among the influences that mould the judgments of men."

The manner in which public opinion issues from the interaction of individuals, and moral judgments are formed that eventually become the basis of law, may be gathered from the way in which the process goes on in the daily life about us.

c) Institutions.—An institution, according to Sumner, consists of a concept and a structure. The concept defines the purpose, interest, or function of the institution. The structure embodies the idea of the institution and furnishes the instrumentalities through which the idea is put into action. The process by which purposes, whether they are individual or collective, are embodied in structures is a continuous one. But the structures thus formed are not physical, at least not entirely so. Structure, in the sense that Sumner uses the term, belongs, as he says, to a category of its own. "It is a category in which custom produces continuity, coherence, and consistency, so that the word 'structure' may properly be applied to the fabric of relations and prescribed positions with which functions are permanently connected." Just as every individual member of a community participates in the process by which custom and public opinion are made, so also he participates in the creation of the structure, that "cake of custom" which, when it embodies a definite social function, we call an institution.

Institutions may be created just as laws are enacted, but only when a social situation exists to which they correspond will they become operative and effective. Institutions, like laws, rest upon the mores and are supported by public opinion. Otherwise they remain mere paper projects or artefacts that perform no real function. History records the efforts of conquering peoples to impose upon the conquered their own laws and institutions. The efforts are instructive, but not encouraging. The most striking modern instance is the effort of King Leopold of Belgium to introduce civilization into the Congo Free State.[258]

Law, like public opinion, owes its rational and secular character to the fact that it arose out of an effort to compromise conflict and to interpret matters which were in dispute.

To seek vengeance for a wrong committed was a natural impulse, and the recognition of this fact in custom established it not merely as a right but as a duty. War, the modern form of trial by battle, the vendetta, and the duel are examples that have survived down to modern times of this natural and primitive method of settling disputes.

In all these forms of conflict custom and the mores have tended to limit the issues and define the conditions under which disputes might be settled by force. At the same time public opinion, in passing judgment on the issues, exercised a positive influence on the outcome of the struggle.

Gradually, as men realized the losses which conflicts incurred, the community has intervened to prevent them. At a time when the blood feud was still sanctioned by the mores, cities of refuge and sanctuaries were established to which one who had incurred a blood feud might flee until his case could be investigated. If it then appeared that the wrong committed had been unintentional or if there were other mitigating circumstances, he might find in the sanctuary protection. Otherwise, if a crime had been committed in cold blood, "lying in wait," or "in enmity," as the ancient Jewish law books called it, he might be put to death by the avenger of blood, "when he meeteth him."[259]

Thus, gradually, the principle became established that the community might intervene, not merely to insure that vengeance was executed in due form, but to determine the facts, and thus courts which determined by legal process the guilt or innocence of the accused were established.

It does not appear that courts of justice were ever set up within the kinship group for the trial of offenses, although efforts were made there first of all, by the elders and the headmen, to compromise quarrels and compose differences.

Courts first came into existence, the evidence indicates, when society was organized over wider areas and after some authority had been established outside of the local community. As society was organized over a wider territory, control was extended to ever wider areas of human life until we have at present a program for international courts with power to intervene between nations to prevent wars.[260]

Society, like the individual man, moves and acts under the influence of a multitude of minor impulses and tendencies which mutually interact to produce a more general tendency which then dominates all the individuals of the group. This explains the fact that a group, even a mere casual collection of individuals like a crowd, is enabled to act more or less as a unit. The crowd acts under the influence of such a dominant tendency, unreflectively, without definite reference to a past or a future. The crowd has no past and no future. The public introduces into this vortex of impulses the factor of reflection. The public presupposes the existence of a common impulse such as manifests itself in the crowd, but it presupposes, also, the existence of individuals and groups of individuals representing divergent tendencies. These individuals interact upon one another critically. The public is, what the crowd is not, a discussion group. The very existence of discussion presupposes objective standards of truth and of fact. The action of the public is based on a universe of discourse in which things, although they may and do have for every individual somewhat different value, are describable at any rate in terms that mean the same to all individuals. The public, in other words, moves in an objective and intelligible world.

Law is based on custom. Custom is group habit. As the group acts it creates custom. There is implicit in custom a conception and a rule of action, which is regarded as right and proper in the circumstances. Law makes this rule of action explicit. Law grows up, however, out of a distinction between this rule of action and the facts. Custom is bound up with the facts under which the custom grew up. Law is the result of an effort to frame the rule of action implicit in custom in such general terms that it can be made to apply to new situations, involving new sets of facts. This distinction between the law and the facts did not exist in primitive society. The evolution of law and jurisprudence has been in the direction of an increasingly clearer recognition of this distinction between law and the facts. This has meant in practice an increasing recognition by the courts of the facts, and a disposition to act in accordance with them. The present disposition of courts, as, for example, the juvenile courts, to call to their assistance experts to examine the mental condition of children who are brought before them and to secure the assistance of juvenile-court officers to advise and assist them in the enforcement of the law, is an illustration of an increasing disposition to take account of the facts.

The increasing interest in the natural history of the law and of legal institutions, and the increasing disposition to interpret it in sociological terms, from the point of view of its function, is another evidence of the same tendency.

II. MATERIALS

A. ELEMENTARY FORMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL

1. Control in the Crowd and the Public[261]

In August, 1914, I was a cowboy on a ranch in the interior of British Columbia. How good a cowboy I would not undertake to say, because if there were any errands off the ranch the foreman seemed better able to spare me for them than anyone else in the outfit.

One ambition, and one only, possessed me in those days. And it was not to own the ranch! All in the world I wanted was to accumulate money enough to carry me to San Francisco when the Panama exposition opened in the autumn. After that I didn't care. It would be time enough to worry about another job when I had seen the fair.

Ordinarily I was riding the range five days in the week. Saturdays I was sent on a 35-mile round trip for the mail. It was the most delightful day of them all for me. The trail lay down the valley of the Fraser and although I had been riding it for months it still wove a spell over me that never could be broken. Slipping rapidly by as though escaping to the sea from the grasp of the hills that hemmed it in on all sides, the river always fascinated me. It was new every time I reached its edge.

An early Saturday morning in August found me jogging slowly along the trail to Dog Creek. Dog Creek was our post-office and trading-center. This morning, however, my mind was less on the beauties of the Fraser than on the Dog Creek hotel. Every week I had my dinner there before starting in mid-afternoon on my return to the ranch, and this day had succeeded one of misunderstanding with "Cookie" wherein all the boys of our outfit had come off second-best. I was hungry and that dinner at the hotel was going to taste mighty good. Out there on the range we had heard rumors of a war in Europe. We all talked it over in the evening and decided it was another one of those fights that were always starting in the Balkans. One had just been finished a few months before and we thought it was about time another was under way, so we gave the matter no particular thought. But when I got within sight of Dog Creek I knew something was up. The first thing I heard was that somebody had retreated from Mons and that the Germans were chasing them. So, the Germans were fighting anyway. Then a big Indian came up to me as I was getting off my pony and told me England's big white chief was going to war, or had gone, he wasn't certain which, but he was going too. Would I?

I laughed at him. "What do you mean, go to war?" I asked him.

I wasn't English; I wasn't Canadian. I was from the good old U.S.A. and from all we could understand the States were neutral. So, I reasoned, I ought to be neutral too, and I went in to see what there might be to eat.

There was plenty of excitement in the dining-room. Under its influence I began to look at the thing in a different light. While I was an alien, I had lived in Canada. I had enjoyed her hospitality. Much of my education was acquired in a Canadian school. Canadians were among my dearest friends. Some of these very fellows, there in Dog Creek, were "going down" to enlist.

All the afternoon we argued about it. Politics, economics, diplomacy; none of them entered into the question. In fact we hadn't the faintest idea what the war was all about. Our discussion hinged solely on what we, personally, ought to do. England was at war. She had sent out a call to all the Empire for men; for help. Dog Creek heard and was going to answer that call. Even if I were an alien I had been in that district for more than a year and I owed it to Dog Creek and the district to join up with the rest. By that time I wanted to go. I was crazy to go! It would be great to see London and maybe Paris and some of the other famous old towns—if the war lasted long enough for us to get over there. I began to bubble over with enthusiasm, just thinking about it. So I made an appointment with some of the boys for the next evening, rode back to the ranch and threw the mail and my job at the foreman.

A week later we were in Vancouver. Then things began to get plainer—to some of the fellows. We heard of broken treaties, "scraps of paper," "Kultur," the rights of nations, big and small, "freedom of the seas," and other phrases that meant less than nothing to most of us. It was enough for me, then, that the country which had given me the protection of its laws wanted to help England. I trusted the government to know what it was doing. Before we were in town an hour we found ourselves at a recruiting office. By the simple expedient of moving my birthplace a few hundred miles north I became a Canadian and a member of the expeditionary force—a big word with a big meaning. Christmas came and I was in a well-trained battalion of troops with no more knowledge of the war than the retreat from Mons, the battles of the Marne and the Aisne, and an occasional newspaper report of the capture of a hundred thousand troops here and a couple of hundred thousand casualties somewhere else. We knew, at that rate, it couldn't possibly last until we got to the other side, but we prayed loudly that it would. In April we heard of the gassing of the first Canadians at Ypres. Then the casualty lists from that field arrived and hit Vancouver with a thud. Instantly a change came over the city. Before that day, war had been a romance, a thing far away about which to read and over which to wave flags. It was intangible, impersonal. It was the same attitude the States exhibited in the autumn of '17. Then suddenly it became real. This chap and that chap; a neighbor boy, a fellow from the next block or the next desk. Dead! Gassed! This was war; direct, personal, where you could count the toll among your friends. Personally, I thought that what the Germans had done was a terrible thing and I wondered what kind of people they might be that they could, without warning, deliver such a foul blow. In a prize ring the Kaiser would have lost the decision then and there. We wondered about gas and discussed it by the hour in our barracks. Some of us, bigger fools than the rest, insisted that the German nation would repudiate its army. But days went by and nothing of the kind occurred. It was then I began to take my soldiering a little more seriously. If a nation wanted to win a war so badly that it would damn its good name forever by using means ruled by all humanity as beyond the bounds of civilized warfare, it must have a very big object in view. And I started—late it is true—to obtain some clue to those objects.

May found us at our port of embarkation for the voyage to England. The news of the "Lusitania" came over the wires and that evening our convoy steamed. For the first time, I believe, I fully realized I was a soldier in the greatest war of all the ages.

Between poker, "blackjack," and "crown and anchor" with the crew, we talked over the two big things that had happened in our soldier lives—gas and the "Lusitania." And to these we later added liquid fire.

Our arguments, our logic, may have been elemental, but I insist they struck at the root. I may sum them up thus: Germany was not using the methods of fighting that could be countenanced by a civilized nation. As the nation stood behind its army in all this barbarism, there must be something inherently lacking in it despite its wonderful music, its divine poetry, its record in the sciences. It, too, must be barbarian at heart. We agreed that if it should win this war it would be very uncomfortable to belong to one of the allied nations, or even to live in the world at all, since it was certain German manners and German methods would not improve with victory. And we, as a battalion, were ready to take our places in France to back up our words with deeds.

A week or so later we landed in England. A marked change had come over the men since the day we left Halifax. Then most of us regarded the whole war, or our part in it, as more or less of a lark. On landing we were still for a lark, but something else had come into our consciousness. We were soldiers fighting for a cause—a cause clear cut and well defined—the saving of the world from a militarily mad country without a conscience. At our camp in England we saw those boys of the first division who had stood in their trenches in front of Ypres one bright April morning and watched with great curiosity a peculiar looking bank of fog roll toward them from the enemy's line. It rolled into their trenches, and in a second those men were choking and gasping for breath. Their lungs filled with the rotten stuff, and they were dying by dozens in the most terrible agony, beating off even as they died a part of the "brave" Prussian army as it came up behind those gas clouds; came up with gas masks on and bayonets dripping with the blood of men lying on the ground fighting, true, but for breath. A great army, that Prussian army! And what a "glorious" victory! Truly should the Hun be proud! So far as I am concerned, Germany did not lose the war at the battle of the Marne, at the Aisne, or at the Yser. She lost it there at Ypres, on April 22, 1915. It is no exaggeration when I say our eagerness to work, to complete our training, to learn how to kill, so we could take our places in the line, and help fight off those mad people, grew by the hour. They stiffened our backs and made us fighting mad. We saw what they had done to our boys from Canada; they and their gas. The effect on our battalion was the effect on the whole army, and, I am quite sure, on the rest of the world. They put themselves beyond the pale. They compelled the world to look on them as mad dogs, and to treat them as mad dogs. We trained in England until August, when we went to France. To all outward appearances we were still happy, carefree soldiers, all out for a good time. We were happy! We were happy we were there, and down deep there was solid satisfaction, not on account of the different-colored books that were issuing from every chancellory in Europe, but from a feeling rooted in white men's hearts, backed by the knowledge of Germany's conduct, that we were there in a righteous cause. Our second stop in our march toward the line was a little village which had been occupied by the Boches in their mad dash toward Paris. Our billet was a farm just on the edge of the village. The housewife permitted us in her kitchen to do our cooking, at the same time selling us coffee. We stayed there two or three days and became quite friendly with her, even if she did scold us for our muddy boots. Two pretty little kiddies played around the house, got in the way, were scolded and spanked and in the next instant loved to death by Madame. Then she would parade them before a picture of a clean-cut looking Frenchman in the uniform of the army, and say something about "après la guerre." In a little crib to one side of the room was a tiny baby, neglected by Madame, except that she bathed and fed it. The neglect was so pronounced that our curiosity was aroused. The explanation came through the estaminet gossip, and later from Madame herself. A Hun captain of cavalry had stayed there a few days in August, '14, and not only had he allowed his detachment full license in the village, but had abused his position in the house in the accustomed manner of his bestial class. As Madame told us her story; how her husband had rushed off to his unit with the first call for reserves, leaving her alone with two children, and how the blond beast had come, our fists clenched and we boiled with rage. That is German war! but it is not all. What will be the stories that come out of what is now occupied France? This Frenchwoman's story was new to us then, but, like other things in the war, as we moved through the country it became common enough, with here and there a revolting detail more horrible than anything we had heard before.

Now and then Germany expresses astonishment at the persistence of the British and the French. They are a funny people, the Germans. There are so many things they do not, perhaps cannot, understand. They never could understand why Americans, such as myself, who enlisted in a spirit of adventure, and with not a single thought on the justice of the cause, could experience such a marked change of feeling as to regard this conflict as the most holy crusade in which a man could engage. It is a holy crusade! Never in the history of the world was the cause of right more certainly on the side of an army than it is today on the side of the allies: We who have been through the furnace of France know this. I only say what every other American who has been fighting under an alien flag said when our country came in: "Thank God we have done it. Some boy, Wilson, believe me!"

2. Ceremonial Control[262]

If, disregarding conduct that is entirely private, we consider only that species of conduct which involves direct relations with other persons; and if under the name government we include all control of conduct, however arising; then we must say that the earliest kind of government, the most general kind of government, and the government which is ever spontaneously recommencing, is the government of ceremonial observance. This kind of government, besides preceding other kinds, and besides having in all places and times approached nearer to universality of influence, has ever had, and continues to have, the largest share in regulating men's lives.

Proof that the modifications of conduct called "manners" and "behavior" arise before those which political and religious restraints cause is yielded by the fact that, besides preceding social evolution, they precede human evolution: they are traceable among the higher animals. The dog afraid of being beaten comes crawling up to his master clearly manifesting the desire to show submission. Nor is it solely to human beings that dogs use such propitiatory actions. They do the like one to another. All have occasionally seen how, on the approach of some formidable Newfoundland or mastiff, a small spaniel, in the extremity of its terror, throws itself on its back with legs in the air. Clearly then, besides certain modes of behavior expressing affection, which are established still earlier in creatures lower than man, there are established certain modes of behavior expressing subjection.

After recognizing this fact, we shall be prepared to recognize the fact that daily intercourse among the lowest savages, whose small loose groups, scarcely to be called social, are without political or religious regulation, is under a considerable amount of ceremonial regulation. No ruling agency beyond that arising from personal superiority characterizes a horde of Australians; but every such horde has imperative observances. Strangers meeting must remain some time silent; a mile from an encampment approach has to be heralded by loud cooeys; a green bough is used as an emblem of peace; and brotherly feeling is indicated by exchange of names. Ceremonial control is highly developed in many places where other forms of control are but rudimentary. The wild Comanche "exacts the observance of his rules of etiquette from strangers," and "is greatly offended" by any breach of them. When Araucanians meet, the inquiries, felicitations, and condolences which custom demands are so elaborate that "the formality occupies ten or fifteen minutes."

That ceremonial restraint, preceding other forms of restraint, continues ever to be the most widely diffused form of restraint we are shown by such facts as that in all intercourse between members of each society, the decisively governmental actions are usually prefaced by this government of observances. The embassy may fail, negotiation may be brought to a close by war, coercion of one society by another may set up wider political rule with its peremptory commands; but there is habitually this more general and vague regulation of conduct preceding the more special and definite. So within a community acts of relatively stringent control coming from ruling agencies, civil and religious, begin with and are qualified by this ceremonial control which not only initiates but in a sense envelops all other. Functionaries, ecclesiastical and political, coercive as their proceedings may be, conform them in large measure to the requirements of courtesy. The priest, however arrogant his assumption, makes a civil salute; and the officer of the law performs his duty subject to certain propitiatory words and movements.

Yet another indication of primordialism may be named. This species of control establishes itself anew with every fresh relation among individuals. Even between intimates greetings signifying continuance of respect begin each renewal of intercourse. And in the presence of a stranger, say in a railway carriage, a certain self-restraint, joined with some small act like the offer of a newspaper, shows the spontaneous rise of a propitiatory behavior such as even the rudest of mankind are not without. So that the modified forms of action caused in men by the presence of their fellows constitute that comparatively vague control out of which other more definite controls are evolved—the primitive undifferentiated kind of government from which the political and religious governments are differentiated, and in which they ever continue immersed.

3. Prestige[263]

Originally prestige—here, too, etymology proves to be an enfant terrible—means delusion. It is derived from the Latin praestigiae (-arum)—though it is found in the forms praestigia (-ae) and praestigium (-ii) too: the juggler himself (dice-player, rope-walker, "strong man," etc.) was called praestigiator (-oris). Latin authors and mediaeval writers of glossaries took the word to mean "deceptive juggling tricks," and, as far as we know, did not use it in its present signification. The praestigiator threw dice or put coins on a table, then passed them into a small vessel or box, moved the latter about quickly and adroitly, till finally, when you thought they were in a certain place, the coins turned up somewhere else: "The looker-on is deceived by such innocent tricks, being often inclined to presume the sleight of hand to be nothing more or less than magic art."

The practice of French writers in the oldest times was, so far as we have been able to discover, to use the word prestige at first in the signification above assigned to the Latin "praestigiae" (prestige, prestigiateur, -trice, prestigieux). The use of the word was not restricted to the prestige of prophets, conjurers, demons, but was transferred by analogy to delusions the cause of which is not regarded any longer as supernatural. Diderot actually makes mention of the prestige of harmony. The word "prestige" became transfigured, ennobled, and writers and orators refined it so as to make it applicable to analogies of the remotest character. Rousseau refers to the prestige of our passions, which dazzles the intellect and deceives wisdom. Prestige is the name continually given to every kind of spell, the effect of which reminds us of "prestige" ("cet homme exerce une influence que rassemble à une prestige"—Littre), and to all magic charms and attractive power which is capable of dulling the intellect while it enhances sensation. We may read of the prestige of fame, of the power which, in default of prestige, is brute force; in 1869 numberless placards proclaimed through the length and breadth of Paris that Bourbeau, Minister of Public Instruction, though reputed to be a splendid lawyer, "lacked prestige"—"Bourbeau manque de prestige." The English and German languages make use of the word in the latter meaning as opposed to the imaginary virtue of the conjurer; the same signification is applied, generally speaking, to the Italian and Spanish prestigio, only that the Italian prestigiáo and the Spanish prestigiador, just like the French prestigiateur, have, as opposed to the more recent meaning, kept the older significance; neither of them means anything more or less than conjurer or juggler.

The market clown, the rope-walker, the sword-swallower, the reciter of long poems, the clever manipulator who defies imitation—all possess prestige: but on the other hand, prestige surrounds demoniacal spells, wizardry, and all effectiveness not comprehensible by logic.

We state something of someone when we say that he possesses prestige; but our statement is not clear, and the predicate cannot be distinguished from the subject. Of what is analysable, well-known, commonplace, or what we succeed in understanding thoroughly, in attaining or imitating, we do not say that it possesses prestige.

What is the relation between prestige and prejudice? When what is unintelligible, or mysterious, is at one time received with enthusiasm, at another with indignation, what renders necessary these two extreme sentiments of appreciation which, though appearing under apparently identical circumstances, are diametrically opposed to one another?

The most general form of social prejudice is that of race. A foreigner is received with prejudice, conception, or prestige. If we put "conception" aside, we find prejudice and prestige facing one another. We see this split most clearly demonstrated if we observe the differences of conduct in the reception of strangers by primitive peoples. In Yrjö Hirn's Origins of Art we are told that those travellers who have learned the tongues of savages have often observed that their persons were made the subjects of extemporized poems by the respective savages. Sometimes these verses are of a derisive character; at other times they glorify the white man. When do they deride, when glorify?

Where strong prejudice values are present, as in the case of Negroes, every conception of equality and nationalism incorporated in the statute-book is perverted. All that appears permanently divergent is made the subject of damnatory prejudice; and the more apparent and seeming, the more primitive the impression that restrains, the more general the prejudice; smell affects more keenly than form, and form more than mode of thought. If a member of a nation is not typical, but exercises an exclusive, personal impression on us, he possesses prestige; if he is typical, he is indifferent to us, or we look down upon him and consider him comical. To sum up: the stranger whom we feel to be divergent as compared with ourselves is indifferent or the object of prejudice; the stranger whom we feel ourselves unable to measure by our own standard, whose measure—not his qualities—we feel to be different, we receive with prestige. We look with prejudice on the stranger whom we dissociate, and receive with prestige the stranger who is dissociated.

Even in the animal world we come across individuals consistently treated with deference, of which, in his work on the psychical world of animals, Perty has plenty to tell us: "Even in the animal world," he says, "there are certain eminent individuals, which in comparison with the other members of their species show a superiority of capability, brain power, and force of will, and obtain a predominance over the other animals." Cuvier observed the same in the case of a buck which had only one horn; Grant tells us of a certain ourang-outang which got the upper hand of the rest of the monkeys and often threatened them with the stick; from Naumann we hear of a clever crane which ruled over all the domestic animals and quickly settled any quarrels that arose among them. Far more important than these somewhat obscure observations is the peculiar social mechanism of the animal world to be found in the mechanical following of the leaders of flocks and herds. But this obedience is so conspicuously instinctive, so genuine, and so little varying in substance and intensity, that it can hardly be identified with prestige. Bees are strong royalists; but the extent to which their selection of a queen is instinctive and strictly exclusive is proved by the fact that the smell of a strange queen forced on them makes them hate her; they kill her or torture her—though the same working bees prefer to die of hunger rather than allow their own queen to starve.

Things are radically changed when animals are brought face to face with man. Some animals sympathize with men, and like to take part in their hunting and fighting, as the dog and the horse; others subject themselves as a result of force. Consequently men have succeeded in domesticating a number of species of animals. It is here that we find the first traces, in the animal world, of phenomena, reactions of conduct in the course of development, which, to a certain extent, remind us of the reception of prestige. The behaviour of a dog, says Darwin, which returns to its master after being absent—or the conduct of a monkey, when it returns to its beloved keeper—is far different from what these animals display towards beings of the same order as themselves. In the latter case the expressions of joy seem to be somewhat less demonstrative, and all their actions evince a feeling of equality. Even Professor Braubach declares that a dog looks upon its master as a divine person. Brehm gives us a description of the tender respect shown towards his children by a chimpanzee that had been brought to his home and domesticated. "When we first introduced my little six-weeks-old daughter to him," he says, "at first he regarded the child with evident astonishment, as if desirous to convince himself of its human character, then touched its face with one finger with remarkable gentleness, and amiably offered to shake hands. This trifling characteristic, which I observed in the case of all chimpanzees reared in my house, is worthy of particular emphasis, because it seems to prove that our man-monkey descries and pays homage to that higher being, man, even in the tiniest child. On the other hand, he by no means shows any such friendly feelings towards creatures like himself—not even towards little ones."

In every stage of the development of savage peoples we come across classical examples of mock kings—of the "primus inter pares," "duces ex virtute," not "ex nobilitate reges"—of rational and valued leaders. The savages of Chile elect as their chief the man who is able to carry the trunk of a tree farthest. In other places, military prowess, command of words, crafts, a knowledge of spells are the causal sources of the usually extremely trifling homage due to the chieftain. "Savage hordes in the lowest stage of civilization are organized, like troops of monkeys, on the basis of authority. The strongest old male by virtue of his strength acquires a certain ascendancy, which lasts as long as his physical strength is superior to that of every other male...."

Beyond that given by nature, primitive society recognizes no other prestige, for the society of savages lacks the subjective conditions of prestige—settlement in large numbers and permanency. The lack of distance compels the savage to respect only persons who hold their own in his presence: this conspicuous clearness of the estimation of primitive peoples is the cause that has prevailed on us to dwell so long on this point. That the cause of this want of prestige among savages is the lack of concentration in masses, not any esoteric peculiarity, is proved by the profound psychological appreciation of the distances created by nature, and still more by the expansion of tribal life into a barbarian one. The tenfold increase of the number of a tribe renders difficult a logical, ethical, or aesthetic selection of a leader, as well as an intuitive control of spells and superstitions.

The dramatic mise en scène of human prestige coincides with the first appearance of this concentration in masses, and triumphs with its triumph.

4. Prestige and Status in South East Africa[264]

In no other land under the British flag, except, perhaps, in the Far East, certainly in none of the great self-governing colonies with which we rank ourselves, is the position of white man qua white man so high, his status so impugnable, as in South East Africa. Differing in much else, the race instinct binds the whites together to demand recognition as a member of the ruling and inviolable caste, even for the poorest, the degraded of their race. And this position connotes freedom from all manual and menial toil; without hesitation the white man demands this freedom, without question the black man accedes and takes up the burden, obeying the race command of one who may be his personal inferior. It is difficult to convey to one who has never known this distinction the way in which the very atmosphere is charged with it in South East Africa. A white oligarchy, every member of the race an aristocrat; a black proletariat, every member of the race a server; the line of cleavage as clear and deep as the colours. The less able and vigorous of our race, thus protected, find here an ease, a comfort, a recognition to which their personal worth would never entitle them in a homogeneous white population.