MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 365
spiritual in-and-in breeding. All these monstrous fungi were latent in the minds of the members ere they came into associa- ion. The formation of the sect simply supplies the conditions )f seclusion and twilight that favors such cellar growths.
The drawing together of the like-minded into a sect is, there- fore, a momentous step. It may mark the genesis of a tangent group that will disturb the peace of society. Since the sect is a whirlpool that sucks in all persons of its type and communicates to them its own motion, it is not surprising that the keepers of public order have always been suspicious of closed assemblies and secret societies. It is justly felt that publicity ought to be enforced upon all large groups founded upon antithesis to the rest of society, and that the astringent of public criticism or public ridicule is needed to correct the eccentricities that grow up in too intimate and exclusive an association.
Blind strength can tear down, but only brain-directed force can build up. Amorphous masses can destroy the evil, but they cannot create the good. The great beneficent and ameliorative associations among men are organized. Of this sort are collegia, guilds, fraternal orders, trades unions, co-operative societies, churches, religious orders, brotherhoods, scientific societies and academies, as well as eleemosynary, trading, and industrial cor- porations. 1 Here we find order, precedence, discipline. In such unions capacity holds the long arm of the lever and in most cases directs drudging, workaday people better than they can direct themselves. That men rightly combined can secure a guid-
1 " Within these bounds [of English group-life] lie churches and even the mediaeval church, one and catholic, religious houses, mendicant orders, non-conforming bodies, a presbyterian system, Universities, old and new, the village community which Germanists revealed to us, the manor in its growth and decay, the township, the New England town, the counties and hundreds, the chartered boroughs, the gild in all its manifold varieties, the inns of court, the merchant adventurers, the militant ' com- panies ' of English condottieri who returning home help to make the word 'com- pany ' popular among us, the trading companies, the companies that become colonies, the companies that make war, the friendly societies, the trades unions, the clubs, the group that meets at Lloyd's Coffee-house, the group that becomes the Stock Exchange, and so on even to the one-man-company, the Standard Oil Trust and the South Australian statutes for communistic villages." PROFESSOR MAITLAND in the Translator's Introduction to GIKRKE'S Political Theories of the Middle Ages, p. xxvii.
