civic action or that our cities are too large to be civilized in a
social sense. These difficulties have been enormously augmented during
the past century so marked by the rapid growth of cities, because the
great principle of liberty has been translated not only into the
unlovely doctrine of commercial competition, but also has fostered in
many men the belief that personal development necessitates a rebellion
against existing social laws. To the opportunity for secrecy which the
modern city offers, such men are able to add a high-sounding
justification for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for our
moral progress, the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom are
constantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowly
establishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporary
government, that the state has a responsibility for conditions which
determine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in the
interest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must be
restrained by the demonstrable needs of society.

This new and more vigorous development of social control, while
reflecting something of that wholesome fear of public opinion which the
intimacies of a small community maintain, is much more closely allied to
the old communal restraints and mutual protections to which the human
will first yielded. Although this new control is based upon the
voluntary co-operation of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the
forced submission that characterized the older forms of social
restraint, nevertheless in predicting the establishment of adequate
social control over the instinct which the modern novelists so often
describe as "uncontrollable," there is a certain sanction in this old
and well-nigh forgotten history.

The most superficial student of social customs quickly discovers the