the Web Mead Project

THE blind adherence to custom so pronounced throughout the patriarchal stage of social organization [1] is partly due to fear of the spirits of the deceased forefathers, who naturally would resent and punish any departure from their favorite beliefs or ways. The cult of the dead ancestor worship - is, perhaps, the most conservative type of religion, and much was gained for progress when nature gods were substituted for deified ancestors as objects of worship.

What is received becomes fixed by self-imitation (habit), and so becomes more obdurate with advancing years. Hence, other things being equal, society will be conservative or progressive according as it puts to the fore old men or young men. The installing of the old in all places of authority and direction as surely brings on social old age as the calcareous deposit in the walls of the arteries brings on an old-age condition of the body

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(218) In general, it is young men who provide the logic, decision, and enthusiasm necessary to relieve society of the crushing burden that each generation seeks to roll upon the shoulders of the next. The Greeks were right in accepting Hesiod's maxim, "Work for youth, counsel for maturity, prayers for old age." The domination of gray beards is equivalent to a fatty degeneration of the social brain.[2] The patriarchal constitution of the family is inim

(219) -ical to the bright ideas of young men, and it was a redletter day for progress when the lad became his own master the moment he could wield the arms of the warrior. The committing of government first to the elders of the tribe, later to gerontes and senatores, the very name indicating the graybeard, threw it into a rut from which only warfare, bringing young men to the front, could lift it. In China, when a man gets to be sixty years old he begins to become a leader, and the older he grows, the more he is honored. A Chinaman confesses, " I approached my grandfather with awe, my father and mother with veneration, and my elder brother with respect." Thanks to this gerontolatry, the power of government is lodged to a large degree in the hands of the aged. " Only the lower official ranks are usually reached in middle life, and it is not until the best powers of body and mind have begun to weaken that the highest places of honor and responsibility are secured. The confusion in government can often be traced to the palsied hands that are guiding its affairs."

It is not surprising that a society thus guided should become a byword for stupid conservatism. On the other hand, tasks for rapid and wholesale readjustment fall into the hands of young men.[4] At the outbreak of the French Revolution the eleven men who were destined to become its leaders averaged thirty-four years of age!

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It is true that the neophobia of the old has its cause in mental attitude rather than in physical decay. It is not that the mental power is less; but it is natural for a man to rely on the thinking he did in his twenties and to refuse to reopen questions he "settled" half a lifetime ago. This atrophy of thought can be avoided if the danger is foreseen, and a man deliberately forms the habit of breaking thought-habits. It can be escaped if a man recognizes that he is borne on a stream of social change and that, instead of trusting to the perspective in which things appeared to his youth, he must look and look again. Then there are searchers, skilled in the advancement of knowledge, who never conclude their education, who become accustomed to disowning their yesterdays and building on to-morrows, who remain progressive throughout life, and in their riper years, rich in the garnered fruits of experience, they render the greatest services to society.

Such splendid specimens are, however, too few to man the high posts, and there is little danger of society dispensing too soon with their services. The danger is all the other way. The aged generals of Frederick the Great cost Prussia dear in the Napoleonic wars, and England paid well for putting "good old Buller" in charge of her South African campaign. A nation is easiest to thrash about a generation after a successful war, when the heroes

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(221) of that war, having become old, and wise in their own conceit, have gone to sleep on their laurels. It is well, therefore, that our government permits the retirement of an army officer at sixty-two and requires it at sixty-four.[5] The instituting of pension funds for college professors will, no doubt, promote efficiency by permitting the timely retirement of those teachers who have not mastered the difficult art of self-renewal. In the sphere of industrial management Americans are as impatient with old men as were the Athenians of Pericles with old men in public affairs.[6]

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Where continuity is precious, where it is a matter of keeping pure for all time "the faith which was once delivered unto the saints," old men are properly kept in charge. This is why popes, cardinals, bishops, and rabbis are appointed old and hold for life. This is why, at the last pontifical election, the great cardinal who guided the policy of Leo XIII was adjudged "too young" at sixty, and was reserved for the next vacancy that should occur in the chair of St. Peter. If " all principles, both of law and of equity, have long since been declared and are to be found in the adjudged cases," if a system of law is "the perfection of reason" and good for all time, then law should be passed down the generations through the hands of old men. judges should hold for life, and it should be a matter of no uneasiness that the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States average 65.5 years, and are separated by an interval Of 43 years from the completion of their formal legal education; that the circuit judges average 57.5 years, and are 36.5 years from their preliminary legal studies; that the judges of the highest state courts are near 56 years, and for them the interval is 32.5 years. If, on the other hand, ours is not a static, but a highly dynamic, society, and the rapid and sweeping transformations that occur in the spheres of industry, transportation, business organization, and urban life call for correlated changes in law and administration, then the wisdom of hinging all this adaptive development [7] on the

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(223) consent of life judges steeped in the older legal philosophy, is open to question.

Commenting on the question, "How can the gradual, cumulative effect of working conditions, and of living conditions, upon the public health, be made obvious to the minds of the judges composing the courts of last resort?" Professor Henderson says: [8] " So long as young lawyers are told by the highest and worthiest of their teachers that 'the law library is the laboratory of the student,' what can we expect afterward ? Every beneficent change in legislation comes from a fresh study of social conditions and of social ends, and from some rejection of obsolete law to make room for a rule which fits the new facts. One can hardly escape from the conclusion that a lawyer who has not studied economics and sociology is very apt to become a public enemy; and many a good judge would be hurtful if he did not get through newspapers and magazines a diluted kind of sociology which saves him from bondage to mere precedent. Reformation does not come from a law library, which has its useful function in conservatism; it comes from a complete mastery of the real world, and a moral judgment as to what ought to be and is not yet. . . . Without this study of sociology and economics we may have acute interpreters of legal phraseology, shrewd money-getters, advisers of corporations; but

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(224) we cannot have the best type of leaders of social progress. The legal profession has already rendered service which we gladly recognize and honor; but, on the other hand, many of its best trained men, lacking the vision for the principle that 'new occasions teach new duties,' obstruct the way with barricades of dead precedents."

Government, owing to the fact that it is a form of organization, is conservative; and hence preponderance of imperative occasions for cooperation over optional occasions engenders coercive forms of cooperation, magnifies the rôle of government in social life, cramps individual initiative, dwarfs individuality, and finally arrests development. The great irrigating, river-basin societies - Egypt, Babylonia, India, China - in consequence of the need of authoritative levee-building and systematic regulation of the waters, developed government to such a degree that they became stalled by these massive structures.[9] Overmuch cooperation in fighting tends in the same direction. On the other hand, little societies like the Greek city-states, established in small valleys with natural defences, opening seaward, leave individuality free and foster progress.

Physical isolation favors the sway of custom. In the "valley closets" of mountain regions the old enduros long after the plains and the seaboard populations have discarded it. In the Pyrenees are encysted the little mediaeval Republic of Andorra and the Basques with their queer agglutinative language. Auvergne and Savoy, the highlands of France, are little penetrated by scepticism,

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(225) divorce, suicide, liberalism, and the other characteristic features of the modern social type. Hidden away in the mountain areas are found persisting social forms which mark out the forgotten trail by which the culture peoples climbed to their present height. The Russian sociologist Kovalewsky owed much of his success in reconstructing early social conditions to the revelations of the primitive societies scaled up in the Caucasus, while Westermarck was enabled by his studies on the people of the Great Atlas to make rich contributions to social embryology. The literary artist in search of local color goes to the Carpathians or the Balkans. The people of the Appalachians, one of the largest horseback areas left in all the world, with their hospitality and feuds, their spinningwheels and hand-looms, their "hard-shell" predestinarianism and their retention of old words like "holp" and "drug" and "gorm" and "feisty," resemble their colonial forebears more than any other Americans.[10]

Says Mahaffy:[11] "This clear and bold, though perhaps narrow, view of justification by faith alone, the sudden passage from darkness to light, the exclusion of all attempts at virtue outside the pale of this conviction, -all has been inherited by the modem Protestant from the ancient Stoic far more directly than most men imagine. We can trace it historically, with but few gaps in the obscurity of the Middle Ages from the rugged mountains of Cilicia, the original home of Stoicism, to the equally rugged land of the Scotch Coverianters. Among the bold mountaineers

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(226) of Cilicia, celebrated in their heathen days for facing death instead of slavery, where whole city populations committed suicide when pressed by Persian, by Greek, by Roman besiegers, this congenial doctrine found its home, till from Isauria, the wildest part of these highlands, came the Emperor Leo to sit on the Byzantine throne and open his crusade against images. It was this Protestant or Stoic spirit that dictated the whole iconoclastic war, and when the adherents of this dynasty were driven out, they took refuge in Wallachia and Moldavia, whence they passed, or their spirit passed, into Moravia and Bohemia, where in due time arose John Huss and Jerome of Prague; and from these early reformers Protestantism spread to Germany, England, Scotland, and thence with the Pilgrim Fathers to North America - all the spirit of Stoicism, so strong in Paul, and so strong in the Scotch Calvinists, that it is difficult to find any closer spiritual relationship asserting itself over diversities of race and language across wide gulfs of space and time."

Islands, if they are off the beaten tracks, tend to be traditional in spirit. The Isle of Man is famous for the old-time flavor of its institutions and customs. In the interior of Sardinia the traveller can reckon on a hospitality that reminds one of the Odyssey. In Corsica blood feud is still so flourishing that France is said to hang the walls of her schoolrooms there with admonitory texts like "Thou shalt not kill."

In general, the country has few contacts with the outside, and is therefore conservative. Here old fashions, greetings, ballads, locutions, superstitions, and prejudices find their asylum. In the back country survive clannishness, the sacrament theory of marriage, full quivers,

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(227) marital supremacy, patriarchal authority, snuff-dipping, herb doctors, self-supporting preachers, foot-washing, hellfire doctrine, controversy on the form of baptism, dread of witchcraft, and belief in the flatness of the earth. Where tradition holds, the institutions of control are effective, and hence rural communities are usually quiet and orderly. But some of their members object to canned life. Mrs. Grundy stifles individuality, and so the rebels break for the city where they will not meet at every turn the query, "What will people say?" Here some, missing the wholesome inherited restraints, sink into vice and crime, while others, on escaping from the cave of ancestral custom, burst into intellectual bloom and help to make city life a fever of progress. The variety of occupations, interests, and opinions in the urban group produces a spiritual fermentation which results in a broader, freer judgment and an appreciation of new thoughts, manners, and ideals. Compare the provincialism and conservatism of the South - essentially rural -with the temper of the more urban North. Compare Russia (rural) with Germany (urban).

The introduction of improved communication undermines the sway of custom in case it depends on physical isolation. When the first railroads were run through the backward provinces of France, the new visibly percolated outward from the railroad as water seeps from an irrigation canal and forms a green strip in the desert. The clan system of the Highlands was doomed when in 1745- 1746 General Wade built his military road into their heart. The railroads penetrating the rougher parts of Mexico set the hand three centuries forward on the dial.

Linguistic isolation favors the old. Difference of speech offers a serious barrier to mental contact and inflow of

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Linguistic isolation favors the old. Difference of speech offers a serious barrier to mental contact and inflow of

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(228) new ideas. A dialect, or patois, - such as Basque, Breton, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, Erse, Canadian French, Pennsylvania Dutch, Yiddish, - is virtually an amber matrix preserving intact the manners and beliefs of a former time. It was responsible in part for the superstitiousness and feudal loyalty that made La Vendee the open sore of revolutionary France. By means of common schools to replace such a tongue with one of the great national languages is like substituting an irrigation ditch for natural seepage, and is necessary if nationalism is to triumph over provincialism.

Social isolation, by hindering contact with contemporaries, makes closer the contact with the past. The Jews, for ages penned up in the Ghetto and barred from full civil and social equality, came to be obstinately traditional. Confined behind the walls of the Jewry, forbidden to own an estate or practise a profession or intermarry with Christians, they kept alive a jealous, exclusive, tribal spirit, foreign altogether to the demotic character of modern society. As if Canon Law and Civil Law had not done enough, the Jews maintained between themselves and the Christians a hedge of their own, viz., their religious and ceremonial observances. The practice of their rites obliged them to live in closest contact with one another and to shun the uncircumcised. They might not eat the same food as the Christians, or food prepared in the same way. Regulated in the minutest details of life by the six hundred and thirteen commandments binding on the orthodox Jew, they were obliged to keep aloof from the Gentiles, with the result that they became in the last degree clannish and conservative. Their feast-days and fast-days commemorate the ancient joys and sorrows of

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(229) Israel, and, after eighteen hundred years, the Synagogue still bewails the fall of the Temple.

Conversely, an institution like the "guest-friendship" of the Homeric Greeks can do much to avert the cramping effects of isolation. Says Keller:[12] "The Greeks were an 'active' race; with them inertia before a possibility of advance was at a minimum. Minds were alive and elastic, eager and curious concerning external happenings, and bent upon an enthusiastic pursuit of material welfare. In all the phases of Greek life are found evidences of this receptivity of mind and eagerness for advance, impulses which work powerfully toward the decay of syngenctic feelings and customs, and toward the evolution of amalgamation and nationalization. Toward this end one of the chief contributors is a body of traditions and usages connected with strangers, suppliants, guests, and guest-friends. Since the stranger became at once a guest, and since the guest was forever afterward a guest-friend, this body of ideas and practices is appropriately called guest-friendship." After describing the unlimited hospitality and courtesy shown to the chance stranger, Keller goes on to say:[13] "The presence of the religious sanctions in such number and strength indicates that the birth of the host-guest relation took place in the more or less remote past; this is witnessed to also by the completeness of the relation's development. Apparently the origins of guest-friendship lay in the reachings-forth of a developing people toward an advance and toward a further and larger acquaintance with a world of greater material wealth and luxury than their own." The people were eager to learn, and men were their only

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(230) books; a stranger, who, if he were not himself a Phoeni. cian, could yet describe the wonders of those magical foreign lands, was a rare treasure to an isolated community. People came to be very fond of entertaining, and gladly accommodated another man's guest in his absence. One man is mentioned who had a house on the public road and entertained every one who came." " In time the real practical value of the relation became more and more apparent, and Zeus became the guardian of strangers, who were the heralds of the time's advance. Eagerness for news, for tales of the exterior world, its people and doings, is marked; it is characteristic of an energetic, isolated community." Guest-friendship seems to have taken its origin " from a period several centuries earlier than the Homeric age, and to have been due chiefly to the quickening contact with an older and more polished civilization."

House life, by secluding inmates from one another and from the outside world, favors custom imitation. Women are most narrow-minded and traditional where the harem or zenana prevails. The marked conservatism of even latter-day woman in respect to religion, education, and ethics - her foolish clinging to superannuated race and class prejudices - is due to the restricting of thought-provoking intercourse by the immuring walls of the home. In the Balkans men's costumes became Orientalized. by contact with the Turks, whereas the women, secluded at home, preserved the old national costumes of pre-Turkish days.[14] The kitchen, lying within woman's jurisdiction, is confessedly primitive, far less transformed by mechanical inventions than the workshop. In South Europe a pot

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(231) or cruse from the kitchen is more likely to resemble some classic pattern than a tool from the artisan's bench.[15] The household crockery and pottery of the Danubian peoples show a similarity of pattern that recalls their unity under the vanished Eastern Empire, whereas the field implements show no such fidelity to the past.

Literacy is adverse to custom imitation because, on the whole, books and newspapers create contacts with the present rather than with the past. Oral tradition overleaps time, books both time and space. Most of what the illiterate receive orally - lays, ballads, legends, myths, and proverbs - is handed down and consequently cuts a channel between past and present, but not between people and people. Therefore diffusion of the ability to read makes, on the whole, for progress, though, to be sure, the staple of reading may come to be an ancient sacred literature. To-day, at least, the power to read opens a door to the newspaper, which is the natural enemy of tradition, because it is bound to emphasize the new and to exaggerate the momentousness of the present.

School education is in our day a mighty engine of progress. The teacher has a wider outlook and a freer mind than the average parent, so that the school, provided it appropriates promptly the fruits of contemporary thought and research, is an emancipator. It delivers the young from ignorant parental prejudices, and counteracts oral tradition by injecting into the mind up-to-date knowledge. Nevertheless, if the basis of instruction be the ancient writings - Talmud, Koran, Vedas, Chinese Classics - the school may foster a traditionalism far more cramping and inveterate than the naive traditionalism of the unlettered.

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(232) The contents of its curriculum make the Chinese school the instiller of the most impregnable conservatism that has been encountered by the Western culture.

Says Sheffield:[16] "The scholars of any city in China could now rewrite the leading classics from memory. Not only are Confucian scholars saturated with these writings , but the more striking sayings have passed down into the common speech, so that those who are 'blind with their eyes open' (the uneducated) are constantly quoting them without thought of their origin. The common speech is loaded with proverbs that reflect the thoughts of the Ancients. Scholars, competing for honors, must present in their essays the traditional interpretation of the doctrines of the Sages. If they should presume to set forth views of their own, not in harmony with this interpretation, they would be stripped by the public examiner of honors already conferred, and would be excluded from competing for literary distinction. Thus the educational system of China has not served to lead men's minds into new lines of thought or into fresh fields of investigation; rather has it served to confine the thoughts of each generation of scholars within the limits of 'ancient instruction,' and to stifle independent thought and inquiry."

The record of Oxford, Louvain, and Pisa as enemies of science and modern thought [17] makes one wonder if there is any conservatism so rooted and fanatical as that which springs from a certain type of university. The traits of this type are brought out by Bryce [18] in commenting on the

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(233) resemblance between the mediaeval universities and El Azhar, the great Mohammedan university of to-day.

"In both, a narrow circle of subjects and practically no choice of curriculum. El Azhar teaches even fewer branches than did Oxford or Bologna in the thirteenth century, for in Mussulman countries the Koran has swallowed up other topics more than theology, queen of the sciences, and the study of the Civil and Canon Laws did in Europe." " Finally, in both, a kind of teaching and study which tends to the development of two aptitudes to the neglect of all others, viz., memory and dialectic ingenuity. The first business of the student is to know his text-book, if necessary to know every word of it, together with the different interpretations every obscure text may -oear. His next is to be prepared to sustain by quick, keen argument and subtle distinction either side of any controverted question which may be proposed for discussion. As the habit of knowing text-books thoroughly - and the knowledge of Aristotle and the Corpus Juris possessed by mediaeval logicians and lawyers was wonderfully exact and minute - made men deferential to authority and tradition, so the constant practice in oral dialectical discussion made men quick, keen, fertile, and adroit in argument. The combination of brilliant acuteness in handling points not yet settled, with unquestioning acceptance of principles and maxims determined by authority, is 'characteristic of Muhammadan Universities even more than it was of European ones in the Middle Ages, and tended in both to turn men away from the examination of premises and to cast the blight of barrenness upon the extraordinary inventiveness and acuteness which the habit of casuistical discussion developed."

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Freedom of discussion breaks the ancestral spell. On this there is nothing equal to the classic passage from Bagehot.[19]

" A government by discussion, if it can be borne, at once breaks down the yoke of fixed custom. The idea of the two is inconsistent. As far as it goes, the mere putting up of a subject to discussion, with the object of being guided by that discussion, is a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose in it. It is an admission, too, that there is no sacred authority, - no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. And if a single subject or group of subjects be once admitted to discussion, erelong the habit of discussion comes to be established, the sacred charm of use and wont to be dissolved. 'Democracy,' it has been said in modern times, 'is like the grave; it takes, but it does not give.' The same is true of 'discussion.' Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal, and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains forever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.

" The only subjects which can be first submitted, or which till a very late age of civilization can be submitted to discussion in the community, are the questions involving the visible and pressing interests of the community; they are political questions of high and urgent import. If a nation has in any considerable degree gained the habit, and exhibited the capacity, to discuss these questions with freedom, and to decide them with discretion, to argue

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(235) much on politics and not to argue ruinously, an enormous advance in other kinds of civilization may confidently be predicted for it. And the reason is a plain deduction from the principles which we have found to guide early civilization. The first prehistoric men were passionate savages, with the greatest difficulty coerced into order and compressed into a state. For ages were spent in beginning that order and founding that state; the only sufficient and effectual agent in so doing was consecrated custom; but then that custom gathered over everything, arrested all onward progress, and stayed the originality of mankind. If, therefore, a nation is able to gain the benefit of custom without the evil, - if after ages of waiting it can have order and choice together, -at once the fatal clog is removed, and the ordinary springs of progress, as in a modern community we conceive them, begin their elastic action.

" Discussion, too, has incentives to progress peculiar to itself. It gives a premium to intelligence. To set out the arguments required to determine political action with such force and effect that they really should determine it, is a high and great exertion of intellect. Of course, all such arguments are produced under conditions; the argument abstractedly best is not necessarily the winning argument. Political discussion must move those who have to act; it must be framed in the ideas, and be consonant with the precedent, of its time, just as it must speak its language. But within these marked conditions good discussion is better than bad; no people can bear a government of discussion for a day, which does not, within the boundaries of its prejudices and its ideas, prefer good reasoning to bad reasoning, sound argument to unsound.

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(236) A prize for argumentative mind is given in free states, to which no other states have anything to compare.

Tolerance, too, is learned in discussion, and, as history shows, is only so learned. In all customary societies bigotry is the ruling principle. In rude places to this day any one who says anything new is looked on with suspicion, and is persecuted by opinion if not injured by penalty. One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It is, as common people say, so 'upsetting'; it makes you think that, after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill founded; it is certain that till now there was no place allotted in your mind to the new and startling inhabitant, and now that it has conquered an entrance, you do not at once see which of your old ideas it will or will not turn out, with which of them it can be reconciled, and with which it is at essential enmity. Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it. Even nations with long habits of discussion are intolerant enough. In England, where there is on the whole probably a freer discussion of a greater number of subjects than ever was before in the world, we know how much power bigotry retains. But discussion, to be successful, requires tolerance. It fails wherever, as in a French political assembly, any one who hears anything which he dislikes tries to howl it down. If we know that a nation is capable of enduring continuous discussion, we know that it is capable of practising with equanimity continuous tolerance.

" The power of a government by discussion as an instrument of elevation plainly depends - other things being equal - on the greatness or littleness of the things to be

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(237) discussed. There are periods when great ideas are 'in I the air,' and when, from some cause or other, even common persons seem to partake of an unusual elevation. The age of Elizabeth in England was conspicuously such a time. The new idea of the Reformation in religion, and the enlargement of the moenia mundi by the discovery of new and singular lands, taken together, gave an impulse to thought which few, if any, ages can equal. The discussion , though not wholly free, was yet far freer than in the average of ages and countries. Accordingly every pursuit seemed to start forward. Poetry, science, and architecture, different as they are, and removed as they all are at first sight from such an influence as discussion, were suddenly started onward. Macaulay would have said you might rightly read the power of discussion 'in the poetry of Shakespeare, in the prose of Bacon, in the oriels of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of Burleigh.' This is, in truth, but another case of the principle of which I have had occasion to say so much as to the character of ages and countries. If any particular power is much prized in an age, those possessed of that power will be imitated; those deficient in that power will be despised. In consequence an unusual quantity of that power will be developed, and be conspicuous. Within certain limits vigorous and elevated thought was respected in Elizabeth's time, and, therefore, vigorous and elevated thinkers were many; and the effect went far beyond the cause. It penetrated into physical science, for which very few men cared; and it began a reform in philosophy to which almost all were then opposed. In a word, the temper of the age encouraged originality, and in consequence original men started into prominence, went hither and thither

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(238) where they liked, arrived at goals which the age never expected, and so made it ever memorable.

" In this manner, all the great movements of thought in ancient and modern times have been nearly connected in time with government by discussion. Athens, Rome, the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, the communes and states-general of feudal Europe, have all had a special and peculiar quickening influence, which they owed to their freedom, and which states without that freedom have never communicated. And it has been at the time of great epochs of thought - at the Peloponnesian War , at the fall of the Roman Republic, at the Reformation, at the French Revolution - that such liberty of speaking and thinking have produced their full effect."

Society rusts on its bearings when it acknowledges the supremacy of an ancient sacred book, particularly a book that grasps the believer on all sides of his life. All worship of an intellectual product from a remote past shuts out contemporary influences; but never is the mind so sealed up as when the object of reverence is a single writing rather than a body of literature, like the Bible or the Sacred Books of India. The latter, being the outcome of diverse experiences, epochs, and points of view, gives some room for judgment and choice, whereas the former, being offspring of a single mind, cramps. Says Bryce: ' "The Koran, being taken as an unchangeable and unerring rule of life and thought in all departments, has enslaved men's minds. Even the divergence of different lines of tradition and the varieties of interpretation of its text or of its traditions has given no such opening for a stimulative diversity of comment and speculation as the Christian

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(239) standards, both the Scriptures themselves, the product of different ages and minds, and the writings of the Fathers, secured for Christian theology."

Strong group or race feeling limits intercourse with contemporaries and directs the gaze backward. Such feeling may have its origin in religious hatred. Think of the clannishness, and therewith traditionalism, of the Jews, the Copts, the Druses of Lebanon, the Parsees, the French Protestants, the Irish Presbyterians, the English Catholics! Or, tradition may be cherished as the badge of a crushed but still living nationality. A people no longer independent, striving o keep itself distinct and united in the midst of another people (Czechs , Bulgars, Poles, Serbs, Georgians), naturally makes the literature and history of the distant epoch when it was independent and glorious, the focus of its attention, the pith of its instruction.[21] If it

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(240) has a religion of its own, it clings to it with a zeal all the more desperate because it is all that patriotism has to cling to. It is not surprising that the Armenian Church, although dominated by the lay element, is in point of doctrine and ritual "extremely conservative."

Indeed, aside from color difference, there is nothing like custom imitation to keep race currents distinct and to delay ethnic assimilation. Eastern Europe and the Orient is a crazy-quilt of diverse races and nationalities that evince no tendency to amalgamate, because they are all under the sceptre of custom. Bryce[22] calls Tiflis a "strange mixture of many races, tongues, religions, and customs. Its character lies in the fact that it has no one character, but ever so many different ones. Here all these people live side by side, buying and selling and working for hire, yet never coming into any closer union, remaining indifferent to one another, with neither love nor hate, nor ambition, peaceably obeying a government of strangers and held together by no bond but its existence. Of national life or municipal life there is not the first faint glimmering." Of Transcaucasia he says: [23] "Each race, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Persians, Lesghiam, Mingrelians, Germans, Russians, is too weak numerically to absorb the rest, and too distinct in religion and habit 3 to blend on equal terms with any of the others. This is a phenomenon that constantly meets one in Eastern countries, being not only a consequence, but a cause, of their unprogressiveness."

The attempt (1881-1904) of the reactionary Russifying statesmen, Pobyedonostseff, Ignatieff, and Katkoff, to crush into uniformity the heterogeneous national elements

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(241) incorporated into the Russian Empire by driving over them Russian Orthodoxy and Czardom like an enormous steam roller, was bound to fail because it sought to substitute one tradition for another. Men will be boiled in oil before they allow another to clamp his traditions upon them. The scientific policy of assimilation aims to dissolve the traditionalism in which the alien elements in a national population are imprisoned by getting them to vibrate in a new plane, to imitate contemporaries rather than forefathers. There are five features of Americanism which have given the United States a greater solvent power than has been shown by any other nation, ancient or modern.

I. Toleration. - Coercion, unless crushing, arouses resentment and race self-assertion. Russia's persecution of the Jews interrupted the processes of spontaneous Russification, refilled the neglected synagogues, restored the influence of the rabbis, and revived the decaying tribal spirit. Dynamite can tear out the ice gorge that chokes the stream of progress, but toleration is the June air that will melt it. There is the old fable of the north wind and the sun vying to see which could strip the traveller of his cloak. The wind tugged at it, but the wilder the blast, the tighter the traveller's grasp. Then the sun came out and beamed till he was glad to throw off his cloak. The point is that we cannot combine coercive assimilation with spontaneous assimilation. If we made our emigrants follow American ways, they would cease to Americanize themselves.

2. Individualism. -To Josef or Pietro our democracy says, "Stand up like a man!" His fellow-workmen tell him, "Be your own boss!" Our nipping and eager air

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(242) braces the immigrants to defy the commands of priest, rabbi, and padrone, the natural upholders of tradition. After four years of it the Lithuanian is bold enough to declare: "When my baby grows up I will not send him to the Lithuanian school. They have only two bad rooms and two priests who teach only from Lithuanian prayerbooks. I will send him to the American school which is very big and good." [24]

3. The Cult of Progress. - The custom-bound immigrant finds himself among people who ridicule the " good old times" and have no reverence for antiquity. He is asked in irony if he wishes to go back to the flail, the sickle, the tallow dip, and the spinning-wheel. He is taught that not only nearly everything that makes him safe and comfortable is of recent origin, but that whatever is will some day be surpassed. We bid him look ahead, not back. Thus we bring the newcomers into sympathy with ourselves and with one another by turning their eyes from their different national pasts to one spot on the horizon - the Dawn.[25] We cannot interest them in our past; we can interest them in our future.

4. Conferring of Political Rights. - Liberality in bestowing the franchise, though it has diluted the electorate, has set in motion Americanizing forces. Not only is the naturalized foreigner the object of much party attention. and effort, but the exercise of the law-making power with the knowledge it demands, the interest it excites, and the responsibility it involves, tends to bring men of different nationalities into harmonious unity.

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5. Education. - On one point only is America inflexible. Dress as you please, speak as you please, worship as you please, but you must let us teach your children." Our insistence on this does not antagonize the stranger, while the moulding influences that can be brought to bear in the school not only detach the young from the parental traditions, but actually inspire them to become accomplices in the Americanizing of their parents.

Sedentariness allows social life to fall into ruts. Long residence in a given physical environment means sameness of surroundings, interests, occupation, neighbors, manner of life. Let a group of pioneers or miners or immigrants settle down in a locality, and in the course of two or three generations, provided there is dearth of stimulating culture contacts, an invisible confining net of tradition spreads over the community as moss covers the undisturbed log or a green mantle forms over stagnant water. Migration, on the other hand, often requires change of dress, diet, style of dwelling, domestic animals, occupation, crops, method of tillage, etc., in deference to a climate, soil, mineral wealth, commercial situation, or population density, quite different from that to which the migrant is accustomed. Such imperative adjustments may shatter the habit of following ancestral precedent and pave the way to a general open-mindedness. This is one reason why those who remove to new countries or to cities show such extraordinary energy and progressiveness. They no longer drag the ball-and-chain of the past. This explains why new countries and colonies are such daring path-breakers in law and government,[26] and by

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(244) their example encourage older societies to free themselves.

A lack of culture contacts may permit a society to fall asleep in its tracks. Says Bryce,[27] in accounting for the arrested development of the Mohammedan peoples-. "The philosophy, theology, and law of Islam have been less affected by external influences than were those of Christian Europe. Greek literature, though a few treatises were translated and studied by some great

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(245) thinkers, told with no such power upon the general movement of Mussulman thought as it did in Europe, and notably in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and Greek influence among Muslims, instead of growing, seems to have passed away." " There has been in the Mussulman world an absence of the fertilizing contact and invigorating conflict of different nationalities with their diverse gifts and tendencies. Islam is a tremendous denationalizing force and has done much to reduce the Eastern world to a monotonous uniformity. The Turks seem to be a race intellectually sterile, and like the peoples of North Africa in earlier days, they did not, when they accepted the religion of Arabia, give to its culture any such new form or breathe into it any such new spirit as did the Teutonic races when they embraced the religion and assimilated the literature of the Roman world."

 

War has been, perhaps, the greatest producer of fructifying culture contacts. Ward [28] points out that "the cross fertilization of cultures is to sociology what the cross fertilization of germs is to biology. A culture is a social structure, a social organism, if any one prefers, and ideas are its germs. These may be mixed or crossed, and the effect is the same as that of crossing hereditary strains. The process by which the greater part of this has been accomplished, at least in the early history of human society, is the struggle of races." " A race of men may be looked upon as a physical system possessing a large amount of potential energy, but often having reached such a complete state of equilibrium that it is incapable of performing any but the normal functions of growth and multiplication." But "by sheer force of circumstance,

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(246) by the exuberant fertility of mankind, by the pushing out of boundaries to avoid overcrowding, by wanderings and migrations, different races, charged with potential energy locked up in varied cults and customs, tongues and tendencies, experience wholly fortuitous encounters and collisions, resulting in conflicts and conquests, whereby all these divergent idea-germs are first hurled promiscuously together and then rudely jostled and stirred into a heterogeneous menstruum that tends to polarize on the social spindle, but ultimately blends." [29] " For all primitive and early undeveloped races, certainly, the condition of peace is a condition of social stagnation." [30]

Jenks says:[31] "Real war is a death struggle, and each combatant will strain every nerve to gain the advantage. If any one will show him a new dodge for defeating his enemy, he will take it and be thankful. He will not ask if it is consecrated by the wisdom of his ancestors." He points out that the state when it first replaced the tribe was untraditional. "The founders of the State were all successful warriors, who had won success by new combinations, new methods, daring disregard of tradition. It was hardly probable that, under their régime, the old traditional, customary life would be continued. Their watchword was ability, not custom." " All over Europe the break-up of patriarchal society is marked by a striking change in the idea of nobility.The old nobility of birth and wealth, the members of the sacred families of the tribe and clan, the great lords of cattle, are replaced by the royal nobility, whose hall-mark is the choice of the king."

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Morris[32] points out how war promotes progress. "An isolated nation is in the same position as an isolated individual. Its experiences are limited, its ideas few and narrow in range. Its thoughts move in one fixed channel, and the other powers of its mind are apt to become virtually aborted." " Yet peace, in all barbarian and semicivilized nations, seems to tend strongly toward this condition of isolation; and such isolation in its conservative influence is a fatal bar to any wide or continuous progress. The long persistence of one form of government, of one condition of social customs, of one line of thought, tends to produce that uniformity of character which is so fatally opposed to any width of development or breadth of mental grasp. From uniformity arises stagnation." " Variety of influences and conditions alone can yield a healthy and vigorous growth of thought. The movement of the national mind in any one line must soon cease. Its limit is quickly reached, unless it be aided by development in other directions." "Were nations, after attaining the limit of progress in their special lines, to be thoroughly mingled, each falling heir to the mental growth of all the others, a sudden and rapid intellectual progress might well be achieved, hosts of new ideas arising from this grand influx of new experiences. In barbarian and semicivilized communities such an intermingling proceeds but slowly in times of peace. A certain degree of intercommerce and of emigration may exist. But emigration under barbarian conditions does not usually bring peoples into contact, except it be the harsh contact of war. The only peaceful contact is the commercial one. Merchants, undoubtedly, in early times penetrated foreign tribes and

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(248) nations, and brought home, in addition to their wares, stories of what they had seen and learned abroad. But the merchants were too few, too ignorant and prejudiced, and too little given to observation, to spread much useful information in this way; and their peoples were too self-satisfied to give up any customs and beliefs of their own for those thus brought them.

"How, then, could any effective result from national contact be produced ? In primitive times the only effective agency must have been that of war. Destructive as this is in its results, it has the one useful effect of thoroughly commingling diverse peoples, bringing them into the closest contact with each other, and forcing upon the attention of each the advantages possessed by the other. The caldron of human society must be set boiling before its contents can fully mingle and combine. War is a furnace in which this ebullition takes place, and through whose activity human ideas are forced to circulate through and through the minds of men.

But there is a special cause that renders war peculiarly effective in this direction. In every war there are two peoples to be considered, the invaders and the invaded. The latter remains at home, on the defensive, its government intact, its prejudices condensed by hatred of the invaders, its people strongly bent on both mental and material resistance. The invaders, on the contrary, not only leave their country behind them, but they leave its laws and conditions as well. They march under new skies, over new soils, through new climates. They come into the closest contact with new customs, laws, and conditions. And their local prejudices only partially march with them. The laws of the peaceful state are abrogated

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(249) in the army. Its members are brought under other laws and disciplines. Religious influences weaken. A sense of liberty fills the mind of the soldier; expectancy arises; new hopes and fears are engendered; the old quiet devotion to law becomes a tendency to license.

"Thus the mind of the soldier is in a state essentially unlike that of the peaceful citizen." " It is in a state rendering it a quick and ready solvent of new experiences. All its fixity of ideas is broken up, the deep foundations of its prejudices are shaken, it is in a receptive condition; fresh thoughts readily pass the broken barriers of its reserve ... .. For this reason we find races which have dwelt long in self-satisfied barbarism suddenly leaping into civilization when they assume the rôle of conquerors. The savage hordes of Timur developed, in a few generations, into the comparatively civilized Mogul people of India. From the Saxon pirates who conquered England an Alfred the Great soon arose.

" Thus the world progressed through its long ages of partial civilization. The combined experiences of the members of the tribe yielded a certain degree of advancement, and there stopped. Each tribe differed from all others to the extent that its experiences and their resulting ideas differed. During peace the tribes repelled each other and remained intact, each with its special form of mental progress. In war they overflowed each other, greatly diversified thoughts and habits were brought into intimate contact, new ideas were engendered from the mixture, new forms of civilization arose. And as war was almost incessant, so these new products of thought were constantly brought into existence. Nomads became agriculturists through conquest; but the habits and ideas

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(250) gained in a nomadic life mingled with those of the con- quered agriculturists, and yielded a new and superior result." "Mountaineers brought down their ideas to combine them with those born of the plain. Deserts and river valleys poured their common thought results into new and more comprehensive minds. The great ebullition went on. East mingled with west, north with south, mountain with plain, seashore with interior; men's thoughts fused and boiled incessantly; new compounds constantly appeared; the range of ideas grew wider and higher; and mental development steadily advanced - though over the ruins of empires and through the ashes of man's most valued possessions."

But prolonged warfare, especially with those of a different religion, may so aggrandize and intrench the great conservative structures, State and Church, that individuality is stifled and development is arrested. Eight centuries of fighting against the Moors so imbued Spain with blind loyalty and fanatical orthodoxy that she finally became dead to the progress of the world.[33] Again, geographical remoteness may cut off a people from external stimuli. Says Sheffield [34] of China: "The first cause of arrested development that may be mentioned is the wide separation of China from other great centres of civilization, which deprived Chinese thought in its formative period of the inspiration that would have been derived from the inflow of fresh ideas. Buddhism entered China at the beginning of the Christian era. Mohammedanism and Nestorianism followed in the seventh and eighth centuries; but this

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(251) was long after the formative period of Chinese social life.

Familism fosters conservative feeling. Family rooftrees, portrait galleries, heirlooms, visits and reunions, attention to family and local history, emphasis on genealogy and relationship, open channels for the descent of family traditions and create a sentiment for the past. The sacrifice of individual inclination to family considerations often amounts to a sacrifice of the living to the dead. When the hero of "Coningsby" took it into his head to form a deliberate conviction, his grandfather cried, "You go with your family, sir, like a gentleman; you are not to consider your opinions, like a philosopher or a political adventurer." Aristocracies always magnify lineage, ancestral achievement, and family honors and privileges, so that, quite aside from the dictate of their class interests, they cannot help imbibing the conservative spirit. The middle and working classes, lacking time and means for cultivating these sentiments, let their thought and feeling be shaped by present facts rather than ancient facts, and are therefore the mainstay of liberalism and reform. Note how, in our South, familism, fostered by the aforetime aristocratic spirit engendered by the slave régime, goes hand-in-hand with ultra-conservatism. Whatever makes the support of one's kin group less needful protection by public authorities rather than by fellowclansman, education at the public expense, public poor relief, facilities for life insurance - undermines it. The universal westward migration that prevailed during the settlement of our country, by incessantly snapping ties between blood relatives and thereby weakening clan feeling, helped to individualize Americans and has un-

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(252) -doubtedly been a factor in their progressiveness. There are signs, however, that familism is on the increase in the United States,[35] and, if so, conservatism will grow.

SUMMARY

Among the factors that favor custom imitation may be distinguished: ancestor worship; giving authority and direction to the old; hypertrophy of regulative organizations, such as State and Church; physical isolation; linguistic isolation; social isolation; house-life; illiteracy; reverence for an ancient sacred book; the clannishness of oppressed groups; coercive methods of assimilation; sedentariness; lack of culture contacts; familism.

Among the factors that oppose custom imitation may be distinguished: giving authority and direction to the young; improved means of communication; the substitution of a national language for a dialect, or patois; civil and social equality; guest -friendship; the admission of women to activities and association outside the home; literacy; diffusion of education; freedom of discussion; freedom of investigation; attractive methods of assimilation; travel and migration; war and conquest; individualization.

EXERCISES

1. Show how the rise of romantic love helps emancipate society from the past.

2. What are the effects upon woman of restricting her to the home " sphere " ?

3. Is it well to regard some topics as too " sacred " to be discussed at all?

4. Contrast lay control and clerical control of a church in their effect on its conservatism

Notes

1. 'Says Jenks: "The desperate tenacity with which patriarchal society clung to a practice, merely because it was a practice, is illustrated by the well-known Roman custom of examining the entrails of victims to ascertain the prospects of an expedition. Originally, no doubt, it was a practical expedient adopted by the nomad tribes from which the Romans were descended, in their wanderings through unknown country. To test the fitness for food of the new herbs with which they came into contact, they caused a few of their cattle and sheep to eat them, and then by sort of rude post-mortem, judged of the result." - " History of Politics," 41.
2. His first-hand observation of the incompetency of aged English generals in the Boer War prompts Kipling derisively to put into the mouths of the Old Men these words:
   
   "We shall not acknowledge that old stars fade or alien planets arise
   (That the sere bush buds or the desert blooms or the ancient well-head dries),
   Or any new compass wherewith new men adventure 'neath new skies.
   "We shall lift up the ropes that constrained our youth to bind on our children's hands;
   We shall call to the water below the bridges to return and replenish our lands;
   We shall harness horses (Death's own pale horses) and scholarly plough the sands.
   We shall lie down in the eye of the sun for lack of a light on our way
   We shall rise up when the day is done and chirrup, 'Behold, it is day!'
   We shall abide until the battle is won ere we amble into the fray.
   We shall peck out and discuss and dissect, and evert and extrude to our mind,
   The flaccid tissues of long-dead issues offensive to God and mankind
   (Precisely like vultures over an ox that the Army has left behind).
   The Lamp of our Youth will be utterly out: but we shall subsist on the smell of it,
   And whatever we do, we shall fold our hands and suck our gums and think well of it.
   Yes, we shall be perfectly pleased with our work, and that is the perfectest Hell of it!
   " This is our lot if we live so long and listen to those who love us -
   That we are shunned by the people about and shamed by the Powers above US.
   Wherefore be free of your harness betimes; but being free be assured,
   That he who hath not endured to the death, from his birth he hath never endured I "
3. Sheffield, Forum, 29, P. 595
4. "This constant return to purely logical activity with each generation keeps the world supplied with visionaries and reformers - that is to say, with saviours and leaders. New movements are born in young minds, and lack of experience enables youth eternally to recall civilization to sound bases. If each generation started where the last one left off, imagine where Lord Chesterfield's sons would be to-day. The passing generation smiles and cracks its weather-worn jokes about youthful effusions; but this ever new, ever hopeful, ever daring, ever doing youthful enthusiasm, ever returning to the logical bases of religion, ethics, politics, business, art, and social life -this is the salvation of the world." - BARNES, " The Child as a Social Factor," " Studies in Education,'' 359.
5. Our navy, on the other hand, is in the hands of the old. In his message on this subject on December 17, 19o6, President Roosevelt says: "Under the present archaic system of promotion, without parallel in the navy of any other first-class power, captains are commissioned at the average age of fifty-six, and rear-admirals at the average age of sixty. The following table gives the age of the youngest captains and flagofficers, with the average years in grade, in the navies of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States.
   

   	Captains		Sea-Going Flag Officers
   	Age	Average years in grade	Age	Average years in grade
   Great Britian	35	11.2	45	8.0
   France	47	9.5	53	14.2
   Germany	42	6.2	51	6.0
   Japan	38	8.0	44	11.0
   United States	55	4.5	59	1.5

6. "One prominent feature in the administration of American works, and perhaps especially so of steel, iron, and engineering works, is the large number of young men who are to be found in positions of authority. This is founded upon one of the aphorisms of American enterprise that a young man's intuitions are more effective than an old man's experience. As an example of the comparative youthfulness of the men who are charged with responsible positions, I probably could hardly cite a more striking case than that of the Pressed Steel Car Company at Pittsburg - a concern that employs about 10,000 hands at four works of unusual magnitude. In this case I ascertained that the founder is fifty-six years; the president, thirty-eight years; his assistant, thirtysix years; the chief engineer, thirty-two years, the consulting engineer, forty-two years; and the secretary, thirty-six years of age." - JEANS, "American Industrial Conditions and Competition," 79-80."
7. Professor Henry C. Adams, in an address on " Economics and jurisprudence," read before the American Economic Association in 1897, says: " Every change in the social structure, every modification of the principle of political or industrial association, as well as the acceptance of a new social ideal, must be accompanied by a corresponding change in those rights and duties acknowledged and enforced by law. Should this development in jurisprudence be arrested or pursued sluggishly' as compared with that of some particular phase of associated action. serious mischief will inevitably follow."
8. American Journal of Sociology, XI, 847.
9. See Buckle, "History of Civilization in England," ch. V, for the obstructive working of authoritative government -as distinguished from the ministering type of government that here and there is appearing.
10. From the daily speech of the Kentucky mountaineers Professor W. 1. Thomas gathered a list of three hundred words obsolete since about the sixteenth century or surviving only in the dialects of England.
11. "The Progress of Hellenism in Alexander's Empire," 144-145.
12. " Homeric Society," 299.
13. Ibid., 303
14. Evans, "Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina," 15, 16.
15. Ibid., 17, 18.
16. Forum, 29, P. 593
17. White, " History of the Warfare between Science and Theology,- I, 128, 133, 149, 387-389, 406; II 335-337.
18. " Studies in History and jurisprudence, " II, 231-233.
19. " Physics and Politics," 161-164.
20. " Studies in History and jurisprudence," 11, 235.
21. "Whoever has lived among these Transylvanian Saxons, and has taken the trouble to study them, must have remarked that not only seven centuries' residence in a strange land and in the midst of antagonistic races has made them lose none of their identity, but that they are, so to say, plus catholiques que le Pape - that is, more thoroughly Teutonic than the Germans living to-day in the original fatherland. And it is just because of the adverse circumstances in which they were placed, and of the opposition and attacks which met them on all sides, that they have kept themselves so conservatively unchanged. Feeling that every step in another direction was a step towards the enemy, finding that every concession they made threatened to become the link of a captive's chain, no wonder they clung stubbornly, tenaciously, blindly to each peculiarity of language, dress, and custom in a manner which has probably not got its parallel in history. Left on their native soil and surrounded by friends and countrymen, they would undoubtedly have changed as other nations have changed. Their isolated position and the peculiar circumstances of their surroundings have kept them what they were. Such as these Saxons wandered forth from the far west to seek a home in a strange land, such we find them again to-day, seven centuries later, like a corpse frozen in a glacier which comes to light unchanged after a long lapse of years." -GERARD, "The Land beyond the Forest," 31.
22. "Transcaucasia and Ararat," 167-168.
23. Ibid., 414.
24. Holt, "Undistinguished Americans," 31.
25. "Neither race nor tradition, nor yet the actual past binds the American to his countrymen, but rather the future which 'together they are building." -Munsterberg, "The Americans," 5.
26. The spirit that prevails when men from different communities come together to found a new commonwealth is expressed by Walker: "Scarce one of these men present at this new founding but had suffered from some law or custom. One man, perhaps through the leaving out of a portion of the rigmarole which in older states the law makes compulsory in a conveyance of real property, had lost his farm and home. When it came to the question of conveying real estate in this new country, he declared that the form must be of the simplest character, something that an honest man could draw himself, if need be, something that would render the legal exactions of the older states impossible. Another man, who, in searching up a title where half a dozen or more courts of record serve to confuse the unwary purchaser, had neglected one of these and so overlooked an important flaw, declared that he wanted but one place of record for all transactions, so that the least intelligent citizen going there and finding nothing against the property he contemplated buying would know, without the costly intervention of an expert, the justice of his title.
    
    " Another, who had seen in some Southern state the laws framed to prevent the collection of mortgages, in the interest of those who are already debtors, and the consequent shutting out of that section from the money markets of the world, declared that he must have a law so clear and explicit in its construction that, if it should become necessary for him to borrow money with which to make improvements, the loaner would have no question to consider other than the value of the securities involved. Still another, who had seen the injustice perpetrated through the inability of married women to hold separate estate, claimed a position for her in this new government of equality with man in the ownership of property, thereby simplifying the legal relations of the sexes and doing away with the complicated wife's dower. The men present from all these states and territories stood each ready to see that the most modern ideas advanced in his own section should be incorporated into the constitution and laws of the new state." - Cosmopolitan, 9, p. 63.
27. " Studies in History and jurisprudence," II, 235
28. "Pure Sociology," 235.
29. "Pure Sociology," 236.
30. Ibid., 238.
31. "History of Politics," 79.
32. Popular Science Monthly, 47, pp. 826-831 passim.
33. See Buckle's eloquent indictment, "History of Civilization," II,121-122.
34. Forum, 29, p. 590.
35. Craze for genealogy and heraldry, manifest ambition of multimillionnaires to transmute themselves into aristocrats by acquiring the necessary lineage, rage for hereditary patriotic societies such as Society of Mayflower Descendants, Society of Colonial Wars, Society of Colonial Dames of America, National Society of Colonial Dames, Founders and Patriots of America, Daughters of the Revolution, Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of Revolutionary Sires, etc.

 

 

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