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SOCIAL CONTROL

allowed a mantle of soft green to creep over the flint of animal ferocity and selfishness. But the layer of soil is too thin. The abundant fruits of righteousness we need to-day must grow on made soil. The primitive Teuton is to the modern what the frowning ledges along his Rhine are to the smiUng vine-clad terraces into which human labor has transformed them.

An unremitting control is needed, for the moral habit of one generation does not become the in- stinct of the next. The sermons preached to our forefathers in the eleventh century would fre- quently fit us, so little has human nature changed. Thirty centuries of circumcision leaves no mark on Jewish babies. Cutting off the tails of mice for many generations does not create a tailless race. What the son of the sot inherits from his father is not the drink habit, but the nerve degeneracy that calls for stimulant. Eight and a half centuries ago, the confusion in Normandy was such that the "Truce of God" was proclaimed. Shall we as- cribe the quiet of that fair land to-day to a personal evolution due to the gradual moulding of Norman character through twenty-five generations of dis- cipline? Shall we not rather credit it to a social evolution which encloses the child of to-day in a civil regime and steeps him in influences that inspire the law-abiding disposition?

Protracted social control does not, then, qualify a race for order. The only thing that can enable society to dispense with control is some sort of favorable selection. The way to create a short- clawed feUne is not to trim the claws of successive generations of kittens, but to pick out the shortest- clawed cats and to breed from them. Similarly it is only certain happy siftings that can shorten

the claws of man. Even in a primitive Boise or

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