Social Psychology
Chapter 12: Custom Imitation
Edward Alsworth Ross
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Custom is down imitation
By custom is meant the transmission of a way of doing; by tradition is meant the transmission of a way of thinking or believing. In this work, however, the former term will be used in a wider sense as any transmission of psychic elements ftom one generation to another. Custom imitation and conventionality imitation are sharply distinct from each other. One is a borrowing from ancestors or forerunners, the other from contemporaries. If we figure the life of society as a flowing stream, then we think of the one as down imitation, the other as cross imitation. To be sure, the same practice may be at one stage a conventionality, at a later stage a custom. When it radiates out from some point in society, spreading in virtue of the prestige of its source, it is a conventionality. When, after making such conquest, it comes to be transmitted from father to son in virtue of the prestige the old have in the eyes of the young, it has become a custom.
Contrast of custom and conventionality
When we imitate a contemporary, we are obliged usually to surrender some rooted practice or belief. Our imitation is a substitution, and has, therefore, to overcome the force of habit. The Occidentalizing yesterday of the Japanese, to-day of the Chinese, involves a jungle-clearing, a tearing up of vast psychic growths that could never occur save in consequence of events which make a profound impression on minds. Nothing less than war,
(197) disaster, invasion, or civil strife can shatter for whole populations the matrix in which customs lie imbedded. On the other hand, parents set us copy as infants when our minds are blank, our habits unformed; when we lack all means of test or canons of criticism; when their example and dogmas do not contradict anything already established in the mind. The tabula rasa of childhood makes early imitation an acquisition rather than a substitution. Moreover, as between adults, imitation marks the outcome of a spiritual struggle. Groups, classes, races, in their primary social contact, virtually face the question, "Shall I fascinate you with my way, or will you fascinate me with your way?" The power of one to sway the other is measured by the excess of its action over the reaction of the other. Sometimes the intellectual struggle is a draw, and neither influences the other or else each borrows from the other in a rational way. But, as between parents and children, the inequality is so great that the latter are rarely ever able to offer any effective resistance. Hence, the ascendency of the parents is almost unlimited.
It is the broad overlap of generations in the human species that makes possible transmission by custom. When, as in the lower species, the young are so well equipped with strength and instincts that they can take care of themselves from the moment they are hatched or born, they leave the parents promptly and there can be no imitation of the elders. What the parent transmits is instinct, not custom, and this by way of heredity, not by way of association. In the human species, however, the long period of childhood helplessness insures protracted plasticity, i.e., an ample time for taking in, and long association with the parents, in the course of which their
(198) knowledge, practical wisdom, arts of life, beliefs, valuations, and sentiments are copied spontaneously, even unconsciously.
Custom and heredity. Analogies
In organic life there is nothing corresponding to conventionality imitation, for there is no physiological crosstransmission among the birds of a flock or the wolves of a pack. But the analogy between custom imitation and heredity is very striking. Both are modes of transmission, and both convey mental and moral characters from parents to offspring.
Just as acquired characteristics are (probably) transmissible, so the practices and beliefs received from the parents are liable to be modified in the lifetime of the individual, and to be passed on to his children not quite as he received them. The variations that break the current of heredity can be compared to the inventions and discoveries - the innovations - that break the otherwise peaceful descent of the stream of tradition. just as between competing structures (gills and lungs), or competing characters (fur and hibernation), there is a struggle for existence resulting in the survival of the better adapted, so between conflicting customs there is an eventual adoption of the more useful, and between inconsistent traditions there is an ultimate acceptance of the more reasonable.
In society as well as in life the recent is the variable
The longer a species remains in an unchanging environment, the more faithfully does heredity transmit, the rarer is " throw back." Thus old species are stable, while varieties and hybrids of recent origin - new flowers or vegetables, fancy poodles or pigeons - are liable not to breed true. The same holds for practices and beliefs. The longer they have been transmitted, the more precise they become and the more fearful is each generation of
(199) departing from them. just as the remoter ancestor is the bigger god, so the older custom has more prestige and is reproduced with the greater scrupulousness. Thus Bagehot observes:--[1]
"In whatever way a man has done anything once, he has a tendency to do it again; if he has done it several times he has a great tendency so to do it, and what is more, he has a great tendency to make others do it also. He transmits his formed customs to his children by example and by teaching. This is true now of human nature, and will always be true, no doubt. But what is peculiar in early societies is that over most of these customs there grows sooner or later a semi-supernatural sanction. The whole community is possessed with the idea that if the primal usages of the tribe be broken, harm unspeakable will happen in ways you cannot think of, and from sources you cannot imagine. As people nowadays believe that 'murder will out,' and that great crime will bring even an earthly punishment, so in early times people believed that for any breach of sacred custom certain retribution would follow. To this day many semi-civilized races have great difficulty in regarding any arrangement as binding and conclusive unless they can also manage to look at it as an inherited usage. Sir H. Maine, in his last work,[2] gives a most curious case. The English government in India has in many cases made new and great works of irrigation of which no ancient Indian government ever thought; and it has generally left it to the native village community to say what share each man of the village should have in the water; and the village authorities have accordingly
(200) laid down a series of most minute rules about it. But the peculiarity is that in no case do these rules 'purport to emanate from the personal authority of their author or authors; . . . nor do they assume to be dictated by a sense of equity; there is always, I am assured, a sort of fiction under which some customs as to the distribution of water are supposed to have emanated from a remote antiquity; although, in fact, no such artificial supply had ever been so much as thought of."
Custom much more elastic than heredity
But there are differences as well as resemblances between custom and heredity. We inherit only from ancestors, but in childhood we imitate the one salient copy, whether it is the example of a parent or of another. The orphan, foundling, or foster-child inherits in one line and imitates in another. Again, the hold of custom is not identical with the grip of childhood impressions. Among nearly all peoples time has a hallowing power, and whatever is immemorial is by that very fact clothed with prestige. Says MacGahan[3] of the annual migrations of the Kirghiz, a people who roam from the Oxus to the Syr: "To anybody unacquainted with their habits of life, there does not seem to be the slightest system in their movements. They have a system nevertheless. Every tribe and every aul follows year after year exactly the same itinerary, pursuing the same paths, stopping at the same wells as their ancestors did a thousand years ago; and thus many auls whose inhabitants winter together are hundreds of miles apart in the summer. The regularity and exactitude of their movements is such that you can predict to a day where, in a circuit of several hundred miles, any aul will be at any season of the year. A map of the desert show-
(201) -ing all the routes of the different auls, if it could be made, would present a network of paths meeting, crossing, intersecting each other in every conceivable direction, forming apparently a most inexplicable entanglement and confusion. Yet no aul ever mistakes its own way, or allows another to trespass upon its itinerary. One aul may at any point cross the path of another, but it is not allowed to proceed for any distance upon it. Any deviation of an aul or tribe from the path which their ancestors have trodden is a cause for war."
"I took occasion now to ask my friend why his people did not stay in the same spot, instead of continually wandering from place to place. The pasture, he said, was not sufficient in one place to sustain their flocks and herds. 'But why do those who live on the Syr in the winter not stay there in the summer, where the pasture is good, instead of wandering off into the desert, where it is thin and scarce?' I asked. 'Because other auls come; and if they all stayed, they would soon eat it all bare.' 'But why do not the other auls stay at home on the Amu and the Irghiz, instead of coming?' ' Because other auls come there too,' he replied. 'But why do not they all stay at home?' 'Well, our fathers never did so, and why should not we do as they have always done?' he replied. And I suppose this is about as near the true reason of their migration as any other."
Why the familiar beaten paths are pleasant
There is, finally, the fact that, unlike heredity, the power of custom is purely psychical, and the key to it lies in our mental constitution. When for some time we have been refurbishing our minds and lives, a sudden feeling of self-alienation takes possession of us. We are seized with a vertigo like that which attacks one on the verge of
(202) an abyss or one crawling along an underground passage when the opening narrows and the earth presses upon his shoulders. This spasm of horror, as elemental as the dread of the dark or the loathing of clammy things, inspires a frantic desire to get back to the old, not because it is better than the new, but because only then can we recover ourselves, experience that at-homeness which gives inward peace. Here, no doubt, is the explanation of the reaction that usually follows upon a rapid and extensive abandonment of custom. It is the secret of the backsliding of native Christians, the civilized savage's "going Fantee," and the revival of Voodooism in black populations.
Conservative influence of animistic ideas
To this instinctive horror of the totally alien and unfamiliar was added the fear inspired by the animistic beliefs that dominate early man. Jenks[4] shows how reasonable it once was to follow the beaten path.
"One of the strongest characteristics of primitive man is his fear of the Unknown. He is forever dreading that some act of his may bring down upon him the anger of the gods. He may not fear his fellow-man, nor the beasts of the forest; but he lives in perpetual awe of those unseen powers which, from time to time, seem bent on his destruction. He sows his corn at the wrong season; he reaps no harvest, the offended gods have destroyed it all. He ventures up into a mountain, and is caught in a snowdrift. He trusts himself to a raft and is wrecked by 9, storm. He endeavors to propitiate these terrible powers with sacrifices and ceremonies; but they will not always be appeased. There are terrors above him and around him.
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"From this state of fear, custom is his first great deliverer. . . . What has been done once in safety, may possibly be done again. What has been done many times, is fairly sure to be safe. A new departure is full of dangers; not only to the man who takes it, but to those with whom he lives, for the gods arc apt to be indiscriminate in their anger. Custom is the one sure guide to law; custom is that part of law which has been discovered. Hence the reverence of primitive society for custom; hence their terror of the innovator. Custom is the earliest known stage of law; it is not enacted, nor even declared: it establishes itself as the result of experience."
The pseudo-scientific sanction of custom
Although animism has passed away, custom still sways men's minds. So long as human beings are so lazy and thinking is so difficult, reasons will never be lacking for attributing the higher value to that which comes to us from the past. We are told to-day that the old has by that very fact given signal proof of vitality. Its survival demonstrates its fitness. This is the argument of the "historical continuity" school, which insists that the presumption is in favor of whatever is borne to us on the current of history. This consideration it was, no doubt, that impelled an English lord chancellor to declare that he was in favor of all established institutions, and in favor of them because they were established.
Why the presumption is against the very old
The student of society, on the other hand, realizes that the correct inference is precisely the reverse. Owing to forces over which it has no control society undergoes in- cessant change. In general, the longer the time elapsed, the greater the amount of change. Other things being equal, a society will have suffered greater transformation at the end of three hundred years than at the end of one
(204) hundred years. Hence, the older an institution, practice, or dogma, the more hopelessly out of adjustment it may be presumed to be. The fitter it was when adopted, the worse misfit to-day. What comes to us from our grandfathers may suit fairly well the situation to-day; but that which spans a dozen generations is little likely to agree with the needs of our time.
Everything fluid in society tends to crystallize
In consequence of the cumulative authority of custom, there is in every department of social life a tendency toward the formation of an etiquette marking the ascendency of the dead over the living, and the triumph of conformity over individual preference. To be sure, this tendency may be counteracted or overborne by the presence- of factors which create currents of transformation. Nevertheless, the tendency is there, and in the quieter reaches of social life it declares itself unmistakably.
Growth in definiteness in language
Language, once so variable in structure and significance, gets in time its grammar and its dictionary, i.e., the petrifaction of forms and meanings; its orthography, i.e., the crystallization of spelling; its purist, i.e., the linguistic prude who abhors " reliable ... .. jeopardize," "presidential," and condemns the use of the passive participle was being built."
Increasing precision in religious ritual
The mode of approach to the divinity, at first a matter of personal discretion, becomes religious ritual, so precise that it has to be handed over to priestly experts. Says Masper [5] of the Egyptian sacrifice: "The species, hair, and age of the victim, the way in which it was to be brought and bound, the manner and details of its slaughter, the order to be followed in opening its body and cutting it up, were all minutely and unchangeably decreed. And
(205) these were but the least of the divine exactions, and those most easily satisfied. The formulas accompanying each act of the sacrificial priest contained a certain number of words whose due sequence and harmonies might not suffer the slightest modification whatever, even from the god himself, under penalty of losing their efficacy. They were always recited with the same rhythm, according to a system of melody in which every tone had its virtue combined with movements which confirmed the sense and worked with irresistible effect: one false note, a single discord between the succession of gestures and the utterance of the sacramental words, any hesitation, any awkwardness in the accomplishment of a rite, and the sacrifice was vain. . . . If man scrupulously observed the innumerable conditions with which the transfer was surrounded, the god could not escape the obligation of fulfilling his petition; but should he omit the least of them, the offering remained with the temple and went to increase the endowments in mortmain, but the god was pledged to nothing in exchange. Hence the officiating priest assumed a formidable responsibility as regarded his fellows."
And in religious dogma
In like manner, the spontaneity of the early Christians I gives way in time to differentiated and precise exercises 8 like confessional, mass, Eucharist, and extreme unction. Religious belief, at first extremely individual, combining agreement on a few central doctrines with a great latitude of opinion on all other points, is crystallized into creeds. Comparison of the Apostles', the Nicene and the Athanasian Creeds, the Tridentine Profession of Faith, the Thirtynine Articles, and the Westminster Confession of Faith shows a short and simple statement of belief replaced by statements ever more full and explicit.
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Constitutionalism
In the state, political relations, expressing at first the application of common sense to realities and practical needs, get more and more tied up with legalism. The written constitution becomes a fetish too sacred to criticise or amend; and it can be fitted, if at all, to the changing needs of a highly dynamic society only by some hocuspocus of "interpretation."
The anchylosis of law
Law stiffens with the accumulation of precedent, or the growing prestige of dead commentators - a Gaius or an Ulpian, a Coke or a Blackstone. Says Amos:[6] "So soon as a system of law becomes reduced to completeness of outward form, it has a natural tendency to crystallize into a rigidity unsuited to the free applications which the actual circumstances of human life demand. The invariable reaction against this stage is manifested in a progressive extension, modification, or complete suspension of the strict legal rule into which the once merely equitable principle has been gradually contracted." Equity itself, at first an attempt to correct the mechanical operation of law by enlarging the sphere of judicial discretion at the expense of technicality, gets bound by precedents, acquires a legal shell, and becomes merely a competing system of law destined in the end to complete absorption.
The petrifaction of procedure
Litigation gets so involved in elaborate procedure that no one dares trust himself to it without the guidance of an expert. A lawsuit, originally a quest for truth and justice, becomes a regulated contest between professionals, to be decided according to the rules of the sport. " The inquiry is not, What do substantive law and justice require ? Instead the inquiry is, Have the rules of the
(207) game been carried out strictly ? If any material infraction is discovered, just as the football rules put back the offending team five or ten yards, as the case may be, our sporting theory of justice awards new trials, or reverses judgments, or sustains demurrers in the interest of regular play."[7]
The apotheosis of red tape
Administration becomes procedure and routine; and those native clerks who were found on their knees in a re, room in a government building in Calcutta, adoring, after the immemorial manner of the Hindu craftsman, a collection of the tools of their craft - pens, ink, sealingwax, and red tape -would find co-worshippers of red tape in the departments of every government. Le Bon[8] cites from official reports the case of the French chef de bataillon "who, having received permission to have made, at the Invalides, a pair of non-regimental boots, found himself a debtor to the state for the sum of 7 fr. 80, which sum he was perfectly willing to pay. To render this payment regular there were necessary three letters from the Minister of War, one from the Minister of Finances, and fifteen letters, decisions, or reports from generals, directors, chiefs of departments, etc., at the head of the various administrative services!" In the navy "the monthly pay of a simple lieutenant comprises a collection of sixty-five different items, 'all provided with long tails of decimals!' To obtain, in a seaport, a 'sail-maker's palm,' a piece of leather worth a penny, it is necessary to make out a special form, for which one must explore every corner of the port in search of six different signatures. When once
(208) the scrap of leather is obtained, new signatures and inscriptions are necessary in other registers. As a receipt for certain articles pieces of accountant's work demanding fourteen days' labor are necessary. The number of reports docketed by certain departments is reckoned at 100,000." On shipboard are found "together with thirty-three volumes of regulations, intended to determine the details of administrative life on board, a list Of 230 different types of registers, ledgers, memoranda, weekly and monthly reports, certificates, receipt forms, journals, fly-leaves, etc."
Fighting becomes smothered in military tactics, the army from a national weapon becomes a toy of princelings, the soldiers come to exist for the sake of the parade, and the Archduke Constantine sounds the first note in the "war against war" by voicing the naive sentiment "I do not like war; it spoils the soldiers, dirties their uniforms, and destroys discipline."
The formalization of instruction
Education comes to consist in traversing a rigid curriculum fixed by conditions long since passed away, or else hardens into a discipline for getting people through certain examinations -the "cram" system. The preference shown the ancient languages in the college curriculum is an anachronism, a heritage from the Renaissar.~e when Greek and Latin were, in very sooth, the great liberal studies. Says Jules Lemaitre of French secondary education: "Our secondary classical instruction remains at root what it was under the old régime ... .. What does this mean? Everything is altered; the discoveries of applied science have profoundly modified the conditions of life, both for the individual and the nation; have altered even the face of the earth. The universal reign
(209) of industry and commerce has begun; we form a democratic and industrial society, already menaced, or rather half undermined, by the competition of powerful nations, and the children of our petite bourgeoisie, and many children of the lower classes, spend eight years in learning - very badly - the things that were formerly taught very well, by the Jesuit Fathers, in a monarchical society, in a France whose supremacy was recognized by Europe, at a period when Latin was an international language, to the sons of the nobles, the magistrates, and the privileged classes. "
Ceremoniousness
Respect and friendliness are expressed in forms of politeness which eventuate into the oppressive court ceremonial of Byzantium or China, the elaborate etiquette of the Persians or the Siamese, the punctilious courtesy of the Burmans or the Japanese. In church architecture a certain type - Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Rococo - gets the upper hand and for generations rules with an ever more despotic sway. For literature there springs up a Boileau, a Pope, or an A cademie Française, trammelling the genius of the artist with precise rules.
The arrest of progress by a cake of custom
In a word, there is in every segment of social life a tendency to form a "cake of custom" which may become so strong that it cannot be broken up from within. This, in Bagehot's opinion, accounts for "the whole family of arrested civilizations. A large part, a very large part, of the world seems to be ready to advance to something good -to have prepared all the -means to advance to something good -and then to have stopped, and not advanced. India, Japan, China, almost every sort of Oriental civilization, though differing in nearly all other things, are in this alike. They look as if they had paused
(210)when there was no reason for pausing -when a mere observer from without would say that they were likely not to pause." Even the peoples that do progress suffer terribly from the cake of custom that forms so quickly, yet withal so quietly, and confines them ere they are aware of it.
British immobility
Says Boutmy[9] "The English people has had to do violence to itself in order to achieve the greater part of that material progress by which it now profits with its customary practical superiority. It began by regarding with contempt, anxiety, and sometimes even horror, the most innocent and useful discoveries: the use of steam, the submarine telegraph, the Suez Canal, and the Universal Exhibition, the postal reform, and the Channel tunnel. With greater reason organic reforms in the government have always been treated as views and dangerous experiments for quite a long time."
American immobility
Let not Americans hug fondly the delusion that they are free of such trammels. Early in their history they did, indeed, for a time, evince a daring and splendid spirit of innovation. They fitted their institutions to their needs with a success that placed them in the van of progress. But to-day their idolatry of an undemocratic Federal Constitution, their reverence for irresponsible power in the form of an "independent" judiciary[10] and
The judicial veto on society's efforts to adjust itself to new situations
(211) their veneration of a common law at variance with certain needs of an industrial civilization are holding them back. In the march of peoples they must not only yield the banner of leadership to the younger societies of Australasia, but they ought, perhaps, to fall in humbly behind certain little peoples of old Europe - the Norwegians, the Danes, the Swiss. A people that tolerates the trammels that prevent it carrying out its deliberate intention to protect women and children in industry, safeguard the health of workers, regulate the conditions of labor, control corporations, fix railway rates, or operate public utilities must suffer from a growing maladjustment of its laws and policies to its needs. Deference for a traditional system of law which exhibits too great a respect for the individual and too little respect for the needs of society when they come into conflict with the individual, to suit it to the present age, results in the following decisions grounded on "interference with the right of free contract." " Three of them hold eight-hour laws unconstitutional; two more hold statutes limiting the hours of labor unconstitutional; four deny effect to statutes fixing the periods at which certain classes of laborers shall receive their wages; another passes adversely on a statute prohibiting the practice of fines in cotton mills; another deals in the same way with a statute prohibiting corporations from deducting from the wages of employees to establish hospital and relief funds; three overturn acts regulating the measuring of coal for the
(212) purpose of fixing the compensation of miners; two hold void statutes designed to prevent the payment of employees in store orders; another passes adversely on an act requiring laborers on public contracts to be paid the prevailing rate of wages; another denies effect to an act requiring railway corporations to furnish discharged employees a statement of the causes of their removal; while another decides it unconstitutional to prevent employers from prohibiting their employees from joining unions or from retaining membership in unions to which they belong."[11]
The judicial denial of other than common law remedies
The same blind deference causes the people to allow the administrative agencies they create for the purpose of inspecting, supervising, regulating, or prosecuting, to be overthrown or shackled [12] in a time when common law methods of protecting the citizen in his rights have failed. Says Professor Pound:[13] "From the beginning the main
(213) reliance of our common law system has been individual initiative. The main security for the peace at Common Law is private prosecution of offenders. The chief security for the efficiency and honesty of public officers is mandamus or injunction by a taxpayer to prevent waste of the proceeds of taxation. The reliance for keeping public service companies to their duty in treating all alike at reasonable price is an action to recover damages. Moreover, the individual is supposed at Common Law to be able to look out for himself and to need no administrative protection. If he is injured through contributory negligence, no theory of comparative negligence comes to his relief; if he hires as an employee, he assumes the risk of the employment; if he buys goods, the rule is caveat emptor. In our modern industrial society, this whole scheme of individual initiative is breaking down. Private prosecution has become obsolete. Mandamus and injunction have failed to prevent rings and bosses from plundering public funds. Private suits against carriers for damages have proved no preventive of discrimination and extortionate rates. The doctrine of assumption of risk becomes brutal under modern conditions of employment. An action for damages is no comfort to us when we are sold diseased beef or poisonous canned goods. At all these points, and they are points of everyday contact with the most vital public interests, Common Law methods of relief have failed."
Why new societies outstrip all others
This fatal crusting over of social life with the lapse of time is one reason why new societies - if not isolated are apt to be more progressive and prosperous than old societies. They escape many of the customs and punctilios that stifle initiative and paralyze effort. Here, in-
(214) -deed, is the secret of the "Western" spirit. Thus we read:[14]
The secret of the "hustle" spirit
"This forcefulness of the West is seen in all forms of social life. It is indicated by those modes of business and habits of action so familiarly known as 'hustling.' The Western man is bound to succeed and sticks at no obstacles. A few years since the people of a certain religious denomination in Minnesota began to take measures for the organization of a church in a rising suburb of a great city; but the management was in the hands of an Eastern society, and plans did not at once materialize in deeds. The members of another organization not radically different in creed learned what was contemplated. There was room at the time for not more than one church, and whatever one was the first to start was quite sure to be the leading one when the suburb should become populous. Accordingly, one Sunday afternoon, about two weeks before the proposed meeting for organization under the Eastern society, the members of this other denomination held a quiet meeting on their own account. They then and there perfected a church organization, elected officers, appointed a pastoral committee and a building committee, and adjourned. The next day the building committee bought a lot, and on the following day began the erection of a temporary building. Meanwhile the pastoral committee telegraphed a call to a young clergyman to become their pastor; he accepted, and at once took a train for his new field. On the following Sunday, one week from the time of the original meeting, the completed building was dedicated by the new pastor. The other enterprise was abandoned. The church so rapidly
(215) put in form has to-day a fine house of worshIp and a large membership."
SUMMARY
The great rival to conventionality is custom.
The roots of custom imitation start in the association of children with parents.
The hallowing influence of time creates an irresistible presumption of superiority in favor of whatever is old.
A rapid and wide departure from the customary and familiar produces in many a distressing sense of self -alienation.
Much of early man's fear of the unknown and untried was due to his animistic ideas.
The long-established has by that very fact shown itself workable; but there is a strong likelihood that it has lost much of the fitness it once had.
There is a tendency for the transmitted to become even more definite and precise, so that each generation is confined under a thicker and tougher cake of custom.
The bondage of the living to the dead is by no means absent from American society.
The proverbial energy and prosperity of new communities are due largely to escape from the burden of the past.
EXERCISE
1. What are your feelings when you have a sudden realization of having drifted far from the beliefs, ideals, and standards of your youth ?
2. Has acquaintance with the scientific view of life and society altered your feelings in such a case ?
3. Does wider knowledge of the diverse traditions and customs of other peoples make you more cautious and provisional in your attitude toward your own beliefs and practices ?
4. Are ancient precepts about the conduct of life worthier of our confidence than ancient institutions ?
5. What is it chiefly that invalidates ancient religious dogma? Ancient teachings regarding the family? Ancient political institutions?
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6. Show that, unless it can be easily amended, a written constitution, no matter how perfect, becomes in time an incubus.
7. Show the dangers of creating perpetual endowments for specific and limited charitable uses.
