between the judicial arm and society at large is avoided by the non-enforcement of unpopular laws. The futility of forcing law much in advance of public sentiment is therefore more striking in this country than anywhere else.
The social prevention, as distinct from the repression of crime lies, as I conceive it, beyond the strict limits within which I have sought to confine my subject. It is true that the lessening of violence by closing the dram shops, of incest by preventing overcrowding, of prostitution by instituting working girls' clubs, of illegitimacy by making marriage easy, of rioting by keeping people "on the move," of bribery by isolating the voter, is identical with the results reached by the modes of social control proper. But the method is different. In prevention, by what we might call social betterment, it is sought to reach the will, heart or judgment of the individual by altering the strength or direction of some of the forces of his social environment, or by transfering him to new surroundings. For instance, for street Arabs we can close the saloons and open play grounds, or we may remove them from the city entirely. The methods of social control, on the other hand, reach the individual by specially-devised stimuli, such as punishments, rewards, works of art, ceremonial. The end is attained by the employment of new forces rather than by the manipulation of old ones.
The system of legal control, with its written code and its specialized machinery is so obtrusive that we are apt to give it the primacy, forgetting that definite physical punishment adjudged and inflicted by constituted authorities is only a part of the great apparatus of control. It is doubtful if it is anything but a minor part. How inept is law without ceremony and without the ancillary sanctions we have seen. Certainly no modern society could hold together if it relied exclusively on dread of physical pain. In stimulating positive social service such as valorous fighting, a sense of honor or of duty is a hundredfold more efficacious than the knout or the gallows tree. The lash will make the slave work but it will not make him fight.
Yet it will not do to look upon law as an obsolescent form of
