e" is
the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole
and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.

Touch and sight, physical contact, are the basis for the first and most
elementary human relationships. Mother and child, husband and wife,
father and son, master and servant, kinsman and neighbor, minister,
physician, and teacher--these are the most intimate and real
relationships of life and in the small community they are practically
inclusive.

The interactions which take place among the members of a community so
constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on
largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control
arises, for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal
influences and public sentiment. It is the result of a personal
accommodation rather than the formulation of a rational and abstract
principle.

In a great city, where the population is unstable, where parents and
children are employed out of the house and often in distant parts of the
city, where thousands of people live side by side for years without so
much as a bowing acquaintance, these intimate relationships of the
primary group are weakened and the moral order which rested upon them is
gradually dissolved.

Under the disintegrating influences of city life most of our traditional
institutions, the church, the school, and the family, have been greatly
modified. The school, for example, has taken over some of the functions
of the family. It is around the public school and its solicitude for the
moral and physical welfare of the children that something like a new
neighborhood and community spirit tends to get itself organized.

The church, on the other hand, which has lost much of its influence
since the printed page has so largely taken the place of the pulpit in
the interpretation of life, seems at present to be in process of
readjustment to the new conditions.

It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening
of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the
influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for
the increase of vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting
in this connection to determine by investigation how far the increase in
crime keeps pace with the increasing mobility of the population. It is
from this point of view that we should seek to interpret all those
statistics which