_Christmas, 1860_.—I asked Grandmother if Mr. Clarke could take Sunday night supper with us and she said she was afraid he did not know the catechism. I asked him Friday night and he said he would learn it on Saturday so that he could answer every third question anyway. So he did and got along very well. I think he deserves a pretty good supper.[38] At the best no society has ever succeeded in regulating the behavior of all its members satisfactorily all the time. There are crimes of passion, of avarice, of revenge, even in face-to-face communities where the control is most perfect. In the Hebrew code there were ten offenses for which the punishment was death by stoning. One of the examples cited above from the Russian _mir_ was concerned with horse stealing. And the sexual passions have never been completely contained within the framework of marriage. But communities have been so powerful that all members have acknowledged the code and have been ready to repent and be forgiven. And forgiveness has been one of the functions of the community, sometimes more particularly the function of the God of the community. A dying reprobate (the anecdote is attached to Rabelais) has been represented as saying, “_Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier._” The community usually wishes to forgive and restore the offending member. It wants no breach in its solidarity and morale. And as long as the offender wishes to be forgiven and restored the code is working. The code is failing only if the sinner does not recognize it and does not repent. And when crime and prostitution appear as professions they are the last and most radical expressions of loss of family and community organization. CHAPTER III THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF BEHAVIOR From the foregoing it appears that the face-to-face group (family-community) is a powerful habit-forming mechanism. The group has to provide a system of behavior for many persons at once, a code which applies to everybody and lasts longer than any individual or generation. Consequently the group has two interests in the individual,—to suppress wishes and activities which are in conflict with the existing organization, or which seem the starting point of social disharmony, and to encourage wishes and actions which are required by the existing social system. And if the group performs this task successfully, as it does among savages, among Mohammedans, and as it did until recently among European peasants, no appreciable change in the moral code or in the state of culture is observable from generation to generation. In small and isolated communities there is little tendency to change or progress because the new experience of the individual is sacrificed for the sake of the security of the group.