their customs and usages will differ, and consequently there will be diverse standards in widely separated localities. This is just the case. The Eskimo regarded it as his duty to kill his aged parent. We have been reared under conditions which have been much less rigorous; consequently we regard the act with abhorrence; it is positively immoral to us. In Australia, a girl considers that honor requires her to be knocked down and carried off by the man who is to become her husband. If she is the victim of violence she is not ashamed. Eskimo girls would be ashamed to go away with their husbands without crying and lamenting, however glad they might be to go. It shocks them to hear that European women publicly consent in church to be wives, and then go with their husbands without pretending to regret it. Kaffirs ridicule the Christian love marriage. Where polygamy prevails women are ashamed to marry men who can afford only one wife; under monogamy they think it disgraceful to marry men who have other wives. Among the Japanese the bond between child and father is regarded as most sacred. A man leaving father and mother to "cleave to his wife" would become a social outcast. For this reason the Japanese consider the Christian Bible immoral and irreligious.12 We are not accustomed to eat dogs, yet among some primitive peoples dogs are regarded as great delicacies.13 Thus the usages of a people may differ from those of another people to such a degree that what is proper and customary with one may be regarded as disgusting or immoral by the other. There can be no logical reason given for these differences in custom. Variance in standards of 13 Boas, op. cit., p. 215.

12 Sumner, op. cit., pp. 109-110.

propriety in different groups is of purely traditional origin and character.

Professor Sumner has called this mass of social usage, custom, tradition, and superstition, which constitutes the essential dissimilarity in the cultures of two peoples, "folkways." The folkways are not creations of human purpose and wit; they are produced by the frequent repetition of petty acts, often by great numbers acting in concert, or, at least, acting in the same way when face to face with the same need. This process produces habit in the individual and custom in the group. The folkways are like the instinctive ways of animals, which develop out of experience and are handed down by tradition admitting of no exception or variation, yet changing slowly within the same limited methods, and without rational reflection or purpose. 14 The folkways constitute that mass of social usage which controls all unconscious response to stimulus and action in accordance with custom. We become aware of folkways only when the usual performance of the act is interfered with or when the act is performed in violation of the custom. Thus, wearing a hat in church violates the folkway which has accustomed us to seeing men sit uncovered in such places. It would be a mistake to think that this process of making folkways is ever superseded or changed. It goes on now just as it did at the beginning of life in human society.15 Use and wont exert their force on all men always. They produce familiarity, and mass acts become unconscious. In modern times the factory system has created a body of folkways in which artisans live, and which distinguish the atmosphere of factory towns from that of commercial cities or agricultural villages.

14 Ibid., pp. 3-4.

15 Ibid., p. 35.

There is another level in consciousness which customs and usages attain. Certain folkways become the objects of thought when one group, through contact with another, comes to recognize that in certain details its customs differ from those of its neighbor. Conscious reflection is provoked, and, as a result, certain folkways are preserved and inculcated. These selected folkways become the mores.16 Mores are the usages which have received the definite and positive commendation of the group. The sanction back of them is more than the sanction of mere use and wont, it is the sanction of conscious community approval. And yet, "The mores contain the norm by which, if we should discuss the mores, we should have to judge the mores." 17 The mores come down to us from the past in the same manner as folkways and other customs. "Each individual is born into them as he is born into the atmosphere, and he does not reflect on them, or criticize them any more than a baby analyzes the atmosphere before he begins to breathe it. Each one is subjected to the influence of the mores, and formed by them, before he is capable of reasoning about them." 18 For this reason the mores determine the content of the growing mind, and so if one were to criticize them he would have to use in that criticism terms and traditions which the mores themselves had given current eirculation. This is why the discussion of such established institutions as property and marriage does not immediately change our relations. Among the masses of people such a discussion produces no controversy. It is only among those who have emancipated themselves from the control of habit and custom that there is sufficient independence of thought upon these subjects to provoke 10 Chapin, op. cit., p. 76. 17 Sumner, op. cit., p. 77. 18 Ibid., p. 76.

controversy. For the great masses of mankind, mores are learned as unconsciously as we learn to walk and eat and breathe. The justification of them is that upon awakening to consciousness the individual finds the mores facts which already hold him in the bonds of tradition, custom, and habit.

To those composing the narrow margin of exceptionally rational and critical individuals, the mores are often a stumbling block of stupid insensibility, receiving their scorn and impatient anger. From this class emanate the original ideas which, when put into current circulation and given the stamp of public approval, slowly change the mores. For example, the comparatively new idea of evolution had at first a rather limited diffusion among the intellectual class. Gradually, the idea has filtered down through the mores of the masses, and, being rubbed down and smoothed off like an old coin, has taken the form of a summary and glib generalization that "men came from monkeys." The philosophical implication of the theory of evolution that there is only relativity in the changing flux of life processes, never any absolute standard of relations, is quite beyond the realm of mores. The domain of mores is one of fixed forms and inert customs. Mores are answers to the problems of life and not questions. Hence a world philosophy which represents itself as transitory, certainly incomplete, and liable to be set aside to-morrow by more knowledge, can never receive very widespread recognition. The majority of men want their conduct and thought guided by established rules and customs. They prefer to do and think with their fathers before them. To do anything else would require too great a mental effort.

From earliest times mores have been inculcated and taught. It has ever been one of the chief functions of education of the young to perpetuate the mores of the group.19 The mores were familiar forms associated with group safety. The chief object of the brutally conducted initiation ceremonies of the natives of southeast Australia is to impress upon the boy the importance of the tribal traditions.20 In primitive society children are constantly exhorted to follow the example of their parents in following the usages of the group.21 Indeed, we must "not forget that the immemorial device of stationary societies to preserve their ancient order has been to steep the young in certain traditional wisdom." 22 The Institutes of Manu preserve the religious mores of the Hindoo. The Chinese Li-Ki, or Book of Rites, of the Confucian text, illustrates the effort to preserve mores. Here, from the rinsing of the mouth to the adjustment of one's leggings and shoe-strings, all acts are to be regulated in strict accordance with usage. Suetonius writes of the customary education of the Roman youth and finds fault with the new discipline of the Latin Rhetoricians which interfered with the customary instruction approved by "our ancestors." 23 Narrow and restricted religious mores were inculcated by the educational systems of the Middle Ages.24 At the present time the content of the elementary school curricula of modern nations is largely one of traditional subjects.25

The perpetuation of this social heritage of folkways

19 Chapin, op. cit., ch. iii.

20 Howitt, A. W.-The Native Tribes of Southeast Australia, pp. 530-542. 21 Boas, op. cit., p. 224.

22 Ross, E. A.-Social Control, p. 165.

23 Suetonius, The Lives of Eminent Rhetoricians, pp. 524-525, Thomson 24 Chapin, op. cit., p. 56.

trans.

25 Ibid., ch. v.