Conscience might be added as another natural or supernatural "voice,"

intuition, and part of the original outfit of all human beings as such.

If these notions could be verified, and if they proved true, no discussion of them would be in place here, but as to honor it is a well-known and undisputed fact that societies have set codes of honor and standards of it which were arbitrary, irrational, and both individually and socially inexpedient, as ample experiment has proved.

These codes have been and are imperative, and they have been accepted and obeyed by great groups of men who, in their own judgment, did not believe them sound. Those codes came out of the folkways of the time and place. Then comes the question whether it is not always so. Is honor, in any case, anything but the code of one's duty to himself which he has accepted from the group in which he was educated? Family, class, religious sect, school, occupation, enter into the social environment.

In every environment there is a standard of honor. When a man thinks that he is acting most independently, on his personal prerogative, he is at best only balancing against each other the different codes in which he has been educated, e.g. that of the trades union against that of the Sunday school, or of the school against that of the family. What we think "natural" and universal, and to which we attribute an objective reality, is the sum of traits whose origin is so remote, and which we share with so many, that we do not know when or how we took them up, and we can remember no rational selection by which we adopted them. The same is true of common sense. It is the stock of ways of looking at things which we acquired unconsciously by suggestion from the environment in which we grew up. Some have more common sense than others, because they are more docile to suggestion, or have been taught to make judgments by people who were strong and wise. Conscience also seems best explained as a sum of principles of action which have in one's character the most original, remote, undisputed, and authoritative position, and to which questions of doubt are habitually referred. If these views are accepted, we have in honor, common sense, and conscience other phenomena of the folkways, and the notions of eternal truths of philosophy or ethics, derived from somewhere outside of men and their struggles to live well under the conditions of earth, must be abandoned as myths.

+495. Seemliness.+ Honor, common sense, and conscience can never be predicated of groups except by a figure of speech. The case with seemliness is different. That also is an individual trait. It is lighter and less definable than honor and propriety. The individual alone must decide what it is fitting for him to do or refuse to do. He will get his standards for this decision from his nearest social environment.

Seemliness, however, can be predicated of a society. A civilized state may act in a seemly or unseemly manner, that is, in a way worthy of its history and character, or the contrary. Also the people of a group, in their unorganized acts, can obey unworthy motives and yield to impulses, groupwise, which are beneath the level of culture which they really have obtained, or belong to policies which are narrower than those by which they pretend to act.

+496. Cases of unseemliness.+ The Assyrians were fierce, cruel, bloodthirsty, and pitiless. They have left, cut in the hardest stone,--it must have been by immense labor,--pictures of cruel tortures and executions and of immense slaughters. A king is represented putting out the eyes of prisoners. What the pictures reveal is the lust of conquest, the delights of revenge, and the ecstasy of tyranny. After Assurbanipal took Susa he broke open the tombs of the old heroes of Elam, who had in their day defeated the Assyrians. He desecrated the tombs, insulted the monuments, and carried the bones away to Nineveh. It was believed that the ghosts of these dead heroes would suffer the captivity inflicted on their bones, and sacrifices were made to them just sufficient to prolong their existence and suffering. This policy was pursued with all the ingenious refinements which the dogmas suggested, in order to glut the vengeance of the Assyrian king.[1636]

The Babylonians were peaceful and industrial, but the Persians combined with great luxury and licentiousness a fiendish ingenuity in torture and painful modes of execution. It is very interesting to notice in Homer criticism of conduct from the standpoint of taste and judgment as to what is seemly.[1637] Homer thought it unseemly for Achilles to drag the corpse of Hector behind his chariot. He says that the gods thought so too.[1638] He disapproved of the sacrifice of twelve Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus.[1639] In the poems there are recorded many unseemly acts. Achilles spurned the prayer of Hector that his body might be redeemed, and wished that he could eat part of the body of his conquered foe. The Greeks mutilated the corpse with their weapons.[1640]

Agamemnon and Ajax Oileus cut off the heads of the slain.[1641] Odysseus ordered twelve maidens who had been friends to the suitors to be put to the sword. Telemachus hanged them. Melantheus, who had traitorously taken the suitors' side, was mutilated alive, member by member.[1642]

Odysseus tells Eurykleia that it is a cruel sin to exult over a dead enemy, but the heroes often did it. This doctrine expresses the better sense of the age, but a doctrine which was beyond their self-control when their passions were aroused. The Olympian household must be taken to represent the society of the time, especially if we throw out the stories of the violations of the sex taboo which were often myths of nature processes or survivals of earlier mores. The Olympian gods show no dignity, magnanimity, or moral earnestness. They entertain mean sentiments of jealousy, envy, offended vanity, resentment, and rancor.

They are divided by enmities and feuds. The females are frivolous and shallow; their fathers and husbands are often angry with them for levity, folly, disobedience, and self-will; but they have to remember that the goddesses are females and make the best of it with a groan and a laugh. The gods have great weakness for feminine grace and charm. They make allowances for the women, pet them, and despise them. There is some recognition of a possibly nobler relation of men to women, but it is only a transitory ideal. The goddesses get into difficulties by their intrigues and follies, but they avail themselves to the utmost of their feminine privileges to escape the penalties. They fool the gods. It reminds us of a modern French novel. We meet with the same sentiments, maxims, and philosophy. What were the gods for? They were superfluous and useless, or mischievous, but theology taught that they kept the whole thing going. They dealt meanly with men. Athena took the form of Dephobus in order to persuade Hector to meet Achilles and be killed.[1643] They sent dreams to men to mislead them. What can men do against that? They mixed in the fights of men, but availed themselves of their godship, if things went against them, and especially in order to get revenge for defeat. There was no chivalry or nobility of mind or behavior. It is plain that the gods are not idealized men. They are worse than the men. Von der March[1644] has collected evidence that the heroes were savage, cruel, cowardly, venal, rancorous, vain, and lacking in fortitude, when compared with German epic heroes. It is far more important to notice that this evidence proves that the Greeks did not have, and therefore could not ascribe to the gods, a standard of seemliness above what these traits of the picture disclose. Since that is so, it follows that the standard of what is fit, seemly, becoming, good form, is a function of the folkways, or rather of class ways, since it is only selected classes who cultivate seemliness. Seemliness is a light, remote, and less important form of propriety. It is a matter of taste, and taste is cultivated by the folkways.

+497. Greek tragedies and notions of seemliness.+ We think it unseemly to criticise the ways of Divine Providence, and we refrain from it, whatever we may think. Since Christianity is no longer imposed by pains and penalties, we think it unseemly to assail Christianity in the interest of a negative or destructive philosophy. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. had not these notions. They upbraided the gods for their ways to men and for their vices. The antagonisms of the mores were antagonisms of gods. In the _Eumenides_ the most tragic consequences follow from the antagonism of the mores of the mother and father family.

The Furies do not insist on the duty of Orestes to kill his mother, in blood revenge for the murder of his father, because they belong to the old system, in which the son was of the mother's blood; but Apollo, the god of the new system, orders it. A new doctrine of procreation has to be promulgated. "The mother does not procreate the son; she only bears and cherishes the awakened life." [Here we see how the doctrines are invented afterwards to fit the exigencies of new folkways.] Orestes obeys Apollo and is a victim. Since the command comes from a god, how shall the man not obey? To us it is a simple case of a common tragedy, that an individual is the victim of a great social movement. In the _Herakleidae_, Alcmena urges that a war captive be slain. The king of Athens forbids that any one be slain who was taken alive. The former prevailed. The Athenian doctrine was new and high and not yet current.

In the _Ion_ Ion tells Zeus and Poseidon that if they paid the penalties of all their adulteries they would empty their temple treasuries. They act wrongly when they do not observe due measure in their pursuit of pleasure. It is not fair to call men wicked when they imitate the gods.

Let the evil examples be blamed. In the _Andromache_ horror is expressed of the folkways of the barbarians, in which incest is not prevented. In the _Medea_ Jason, who is a scoundrel and a cur, prates to Medea about her gain in coming to Greece: "Thou hast learned what justice means, and how to live by law, not by the dictates of brute force." She had not learned it at all--quite the contrary. In the _Hekuba_ it is said to be a disgrace to murder guests in Greece, and in _Iphigenia amongst the Taurians_ the same doctrine is stated when Greeks are to be the victims of the contrary rule. "Barbarian" was a cultural category. To be Greek was to have city life with market place, gymnastic training, and a share in the games.[1645] These were arbitrary marks of superiority such as the members of an esoteric corporation always love, but the time came when the Greek history contained so many shameful things that the Greeks ceased to talk of the contrast with barbarians. It was proposed to Pausanias that he should repay on the corpse of Mardonius the insults inflicted by Xerxes on the body of Leonidas. He indignantly refused.[1646] The old laws of war put the life and property of the vanquished, and their wives and children, at the mercy of the conquerors, but the Greeks, when the Peloponnesian war began, felt the shame of this law as between Greeks. Therefore they sinned against their own better feeling when in that war they enslaved and slaughtered the vanquished. That they knew better is shown by the conduct of the Athenians towards Mytilene, in 427. At first all adult males were sentenced to death, and the women and children to slavery, but later this sentence was revoked. Cases also occurred in which the law of war was not followed, but the conquered were spared. By retaliation they inflamed their own passions and went on from bad to worse until there was a revulsion of pure shame. Lysander put to death three thousand Athenians, captives, after the battle of aegospotami, as reprisals for the barbarities executed by the Athenians against Sparta and her allies.

The allies wanted to exercise war law on Athens, but Sparta would not consent. To her then belongs the honor of fixing a new precedent. It was her duty to do so after the act of Lysander. Beloch thinks that science made the greater humanity of the fourth century.[1647] It is more probable that it was due to a perception of the horror and shame of the other course. The parties in the cities, in the later centuries, were also guilty of excess, rancorous passion, revenge, and oppression. These cases come under the head of unseemliness in so far as they show a lack of sense of where to stop. That sense, especially in the political acts of democracies, must be a resultant, in the minds of men of the most numerous classes, from the spirit and temper of the folkways.

+498. Seemliness in the Middle Ages.+ In the Middle Ages very great attention was given to seemliness in the private conduct of individuals.

Moderation especially was to be cultivated. Women were put under minute rules of dress, posture, walk, language, tone of voice, and attitude.

The guiding spirit of the regulations was restraint and limit.[1648]

Public life, however, was characterized by great unseemliness, and the examples of it are especially valuable because they show how necessary a sense of seemliness is to prevent great evils, although the virtue itself is vague and refined, and entirely beyond the field of positive cultivation by education or law. When the crusaders captured Mohammedan cities they showed savage ferocity. A case is recorded of a quarrel between a man of rank and a cook. The former proceeded to very extreme measures, and the cook, since he was a cook, could get no redress or attention.[1649] In the fifteenth century a rage for indecent conduct arose. The type which the Germans call the _Grobian_ was affected.

Rudeness of manners in eating, dancing, etc., was cultivated as a pose.

This fashion lasted for more than a century. In 1570 a society was formed of twenty-seven members, who swore to be nasty, not to wash or pray, and to practice blasphemy, etc. When drunk such persons committed great breaches of order, decency, etc.[1650]

+499. Unseemly debate.+ The folkways of the Middle Ages were fantastic and extravagant. The people had their chief interest in the future world, about which there could be no reality. They lived in a world of phantasms. The phantasms were dictated to them upon authority in the shape of dogmas of world philosophy and precepts of conduct. In discussing the world philosophy and its application they attained to extremes of animosity and ferocity. Whether Jesus and his apostles lived in voluntary beggary; whether any part of the blood of Jesus remained on earth; whether the dead went at once, or only at the judgment day, into the presence of God,--are specimens of the questions they debated. The unseemliness was in the mode of discussion, not in the absurdity of the subject. They all went into the debate understanding that the defeated or weaker party was to be burned. That was the rule of the game. All the strife of sects and parties was carried on in unseemly ways and with scandalous incidents. The lack of control, measure, due limit, was due to the lack of reality. Torture, persecution, violent measures, would all have been impossible if there had been a sense of seemliness. The punishments, executions, and public amusements grossly outraged any human and civilized taste. The treatment of the Templars, although it was no doubt good statecraft to abolish the order, was a scandalous outrage. In the face of Christendom torture was used to extort the evidence which was wanted to destroy the order, without regard to truth and justice.[1651] The crusades were extravagant and fantastic, and were attended by incidents of shameful excess, gross selfishness, venality, and bad faith. It is one of the most amazing facts about witch persecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that jurists did not see the unseemliness of their acts compared with the civilization of the period and the character claimed by their states. How was it possible for grave, learned, and honest men to go on torturing and burning miserable old women? It is not until the end of the seventeenth century that we hear of sheriffs in England who refused to burn witches.

One of the most unseemly incidents in history is the execution of Damiens for attempting to kill Louis XV. The authorities of the first state in Christendom multiplied tortures of the extremest kind, and caused them to be executed in public on the culprit. The treatment of the Tories in the American Revolution was unseemly. It left a deep stain on our history.

+500. Unseemliness of lynching, torture, etc.+ It is an unseemly thing and unworthy of our age and civilization that persons should be lynched for alleged crime, without the trial and proof which our institutions provide for. The arguments in defense of lynching (except on the frontier, where civil institutions do not yet exist) never touch on this point. It is unseemly that any one should be burned at the stake in a modern civilized state. It is nothing to the purpose to show what a wicked wretch the victim was. Burning alive has long been thrown out of the folkways of our ancestors. The objection to reviving it is not an apology for the bad men or a denial of their wickedness: it is the goodness of the lynchers. They fall below what they owe to themselves.

Torture has also long been thrown out of our folkways. It might have been believed a few years ago that torture could not be employed under the jurisdiction of the United States, and that, if it was employed, there would be a unanimous outburst of indignant reprobation against those who had so disgraced us. When torture was employed in the Philippines no such outburst occurred. The facts and the judgment upon them were easily suppressed. The recognition of Panama was unseemly. It was unworthy of the United States. It was defended and justified by the argument that we got something which we very earnestly wanted.

+501. Good taste.+ Finally we may notice here also the matter of taste.

Good taste is the most subtle of all the codes of judgment which are cultivated by the mores. What we now consider good taste was violated in the dramas of the Greeks and Romans. This is entirely aside from obscenity or vulgarity. For instance, it does not appear that the author of the _Medea_ appreciated the dastardly conduct of Jason. De Julleville[1652] says that in the thirteenth century no one knew the distinction between good and bad taste. The assertion is fully justified. The mediaeval people may have had good taste in architecture, stained glass, and hammered iron (as we are told), but their literature, administration of justice, and politics show that they lacked good taste, and also the case shows what a high protection against folly and error good taste is. This last office it shares with the sense of humor.

The sports of that age were cruel. People found fun in the sufferings of the weak under derision and abuse. "The Middle Ages did not shrink from presenting as funny situations which were painful or atrocious, the horror of which we to-day could not endure." Although the age was full of religiosity, the extravagances of which ought to have been restrained by good taste, if it had existed, there was, on the other hand, no true reverence for what were "sacred things." The churches were put to uses which would to-day be considered improper. Parodies and caricatures of ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and ritual called out no remonstrance. Mock sermons were a favorite form of monologue in a theatrical entertainment. In a morality produced late in the fifteenth century, called _Les Blasphemateurs_, the actors tortured and wounded the figure on a crucifix. The Virgin and two angels came down to catch in a cup the blood which miraculously flowed from the body, but the actors kept on. "The hideous scene is interminable." Personalities were employed beyond all decent toleration, not only in theological disputes, but in political conflicts of all kinds. Of course the fanaticism of the age accounts for the extravagance of the acts and doctrines, and good taste seems to be only a trivial defense against fanaticism, but good taste consists largely in a sense of due limits, and if there had been a good code of social usage tempered by taste, it would have prevented many of the greatest scandals in the history, especially the church history, of the period. Buffoons had a share in the great "moralities,"

although they did not have a role in the action. Their function was to interject comical comments from time to time. The comments aimed to be witty, but were generally gross, coarse, and obscene. Late in the fifteenth century, in France, a buffoon recited a prelude containing licentious jests to an edifying morality called _Charity_.[1653]

+502. Whence good taste is derived.+ Good taste is a more delicate and refined philosophy of action than any which have been mentioned above.

It would escape from any attempt to formulate it, more completely than propriety or politeness. It floats in the ways of the group, and is absorbed by those who grow up in it. It is a product of breeding. We have a well-worn saying that there is no disputing about it. That is true, but for equal reason there is no disputing about decency, propriety, obscenity, or sex taboo. Good taste is a product of the group. It is absorbed from the group. Like honor, however, it calls for an individual reaction of assent and dissent, and becomes an individual trait or possession in the form which it ultimately takes.

+503. The great variety in the codes.+ All the topics which have been treated in this chapter are branches or outreachings of the social code.

They show how deep is the interest of human beings in the sex taboo, and in the self-perpetuation of society. Men have always tried, and are trying still, to solve the problem of well living in this respect. The men, the women, the children, and the society have joint and several interests, and the complication is great. At the present time population, race, marriage, childbirth, and the education of children present us our greatest problems and most unfathomable mysteries. All the contradictory usages of chastity, decency, propriety, etc., have their sense in some assumed relation to the welfare of society. To some extent they have come out of caprice, but chiefly they have issued from experience of good and ill, and are due to efforts to live well. Thus we may discern in them policies and philosophies, but they never proceed to form any such generalities as do rationally adopted motives. There is logic in the folkways, but never rationality. Given the premises, in a notion of kin, for instance, and the deductions are made directly and generally correctly, but the premises could never be verified, and they were oftener false than true. Each group took its own way, making its own assumptions, and following its own logic. So there was great variety and discord in their policies and philosophies, but within the area of a custom, during its dominion, its authority is absolute; and hence, although the usages are infinitely various, directly contradictory, and mutually abominable, they are, within their area of dominion, of equal value and force, and they are the standards of what is true and right.

The groups have often tried to convert each other by argument and reason. They have never succeeded. Each one's reasons are the tradition which it has received from its ancestors. That does not admit of argument. Each tries to convince the other by going outside of the tradition to some philosophic standard of truth. Then the tradition is left in full force. Shocking as it must be to any group to be told that there is no rational ground for any one of them to convert another group to its mores (because this seems to imply, although it does not, that their folkways are not better than those of other groups), yet this must be said, for it is true. By experience and science the nations which by name are Christian have reached ways which are better fitted, on the whole, for well living than those of the Mohammedan nations, although this superiority is not by any means so complete and sweeping as current opinion in Christian countries believes. If Christians and Mohammedans come together and argue, they never make the slightest impression on each other. During the crusades, in Andalusia, and in cities of the near East where they live side by side, they have come to peace, mutual respect, and mutual influence. Syncretism begins. There is giving and taking. In Egypt at present the Moslems see the power of the English to carry on industry, commerce, and government, and this observation produces effect on the folkways. That is the chief way in which folkways are modified or borrowed. It was by this process that Greeks and Romans influenced the folkways of barbarians, and that white men have influenced those of negroes, Indians, Polynesians, Japanese, etc.

+504. Morals and deportment.+ Different groups and different ages have differed much in the place in the social codes in which certain subjects have been placed; that is, for instance, as to whether the treatment of women by men should be put under morals, or under manners, or under good taste; whether public exhibitions deserved more attention than deportment, etc. For instance: "There is hardly a word, in the instructions of Plutarch, upon schools and schooling, but he alludes casually to the strange scenes which boys were allowed to witness,--criminals dressed up with robes and crowns, and presently stripped and publicly tortured; paintings of subjects so objectionable that we should carefully explain to the child the distinction between art as such and art as a vehicle of morals. On the other hand, deportment was strictly watched: for example, it was the rule not to use the left hand unless it were to hold bread at dinner, while other food was taken with the right; to walk in the street without looking up; to touch salt fish with one finger; fresh fish, bread, and meat, with two; to scratch yourself thus; to fold your cloak thus."[1654]

+505. The relation of the social codes to philosophy and religion.+ Amongst the widest differences of opinion would be that on the question whether the social codes issue out of and are enthused by philosophy or religion. We are told that "for most men, actions stand in no necessary connection with any theoretical convictions of theirs, but are, on the contrary, independent of the same, and are dominated by inherited and acquired motives."[1655] Why is this not true? Also, "the antagonism between the principles of our religion and our actual behavior, even of the faithful, as well as the great difference in the ethical views of different peoples who profess the same religion, sufficiently proves that the motives of our acts, and our judgments on the acts of others, proceed primarily from practical life [i.e. from the current mores], and that what we believe has comparatively little influence on our acts and judgments."[1656] Religion and philosophy are components of the mores, but not by any means sources or regulators of them.

+506. Rudeck's conclusions.+ A recent German writer on the history of public morality[1657] says of the moral development of the German people that one cannot bear to contemplate it, because the people face the facts with absolute indifference. There is not a trace of moral initiative or of moral consciousness. Existing morality presents itself to us as a purely accidental product of forces which act without sense or intelligence. We can find all kinds of forces in history except ethical forces. Those are entirely wanting. There is no development, for development means the unfolding and growth of a germ according to the elements which it contains. The people allow all kinds of mores to be forced on them by the work of their own hands, that is, by the economic and political arrangements which they have adopted. The German people has no subjective notion of public morality and no ethical ideal for public morality. They distinguish only between good and bad mores (_Sitten und Unsitten_), without regard to their origin.

+507.+ Rudeck's book is really a chapter in the history of the mores.

The above are the conclusions which seem to be forced upon him, but he recoils from them in dismay. The conclusions are unquestionably correct.

They are exactly what the history teaches. They ought to be accepted and used for profit. The fact that people are indifferent to the history of their own mores is a primary fact. We can only accept it and learn from it. It shows us the immense error of that current social discussion which consists in bringing "ethical" notions to the criticism of facts.

The ethical notions are figments of speculation. Criticism of the mores is like criticising one's ancestors for the physique one has inherited, or one's children for being, in body and mind, one's children. If it is true of the German people that there is no moral initiative or consciousness in their tone and attitude towards their mores, they are to be congratulated, for they have kept out one great influx of subjective and dogmatic mischief. Other nations have a "nonconformist conscience" or a party of "great moral ideas," which can be caught by a phrase, or stampeded by a catching watchword with a "moral" suggestion.

"Existing morality _does_ present itself as a purely accidental [i.e.

not to be investigated] product of forces which act without sense or intelligence," but the product is in no true sense accidental. It is true that there are no ethical forces in history. Let us recognize the fact and its consequences. Some philosophers make great efforts to interpret ethical forces into history, but they play with words. There is no development of the mores along any lines of logical or other sequence. The mores shift in endless readjustment of the modes of behavior, effort, and thinking, so as to reach the greatest advantage under the conditions. "The people allow all kinds of mores to be forced on them by the work of their own hands," that is, by the economic and political arrangements which have been unconsciously forced on them by their instinctive efforts to live well. That is just what they do, and that is the way in which mores come to be. "The German people has no subjective notion of public morality and no ethical ideal for public morality." Nor has any other people. A people sometimes adopts an ideal of national vanity, which includes ambition, but an ethical ideal no group ever has. If it pretended to have one it would be a humbug. That is why the introduction of "moral ideas" into politics serves the most immoral purposes and plays into the hands of the most immoral men. All ethics grow out of the mores and are a part of them. That is why the ethics never can be antecedent to the mores, and cannot be in a causal or productive relation to them. "The German people distinguishes only between customs and abuses [_Sitten und Unsitten_] without regard to their origin." They are quite right to do so, because the origin is only a matter for historians. For the masses the mores are facts. They use them and they testify that they are conducive to well living (_Sitten_), or the contrary (_Unsitten_). The men, women, and children who compose a society at any time are the unconscious depositaries and transmitters of the mores. They inherited them without knowing it; they are molding them unconsciously; they will transmit them involuntarily. The people cannot make the mores. They are made by them. Yet the group is at once makers and made. Each one may put into the group life as much as he can, but the group will give back to him order and determination from which he cannot escape. The mores grow as they must grow under the conditions.

They are products of the effort of each to live as well as he can, and they are coercions which hold and control each in his efforts to live well. It is idle to try to get outside of this operation in order to tell which part of it comes first and makes the other. "Our age presents us the incredible spectacle that the dependence of the higher social culture on the economic development is not only clearly recognized by social science, but is proclaimed as the ideal." Social science does not proclaim this as an ideal. It does not deal in ideals. It accepts the dependence of culture on economic development as a fact. In fact, Rudeck is not justified in saying (p. 426) that "culture is the unity of the moral will in all the life phenomena of a people," and that "that people alone is a culture people which sets before itself, as the purpose of its entire existence, the production of the greatest possible amount of specified moral qualities." These are notions of culture and of a culture people which an ethical philosopher might think it fine should be. Rudeck has just found that no such things ever have existed in Germany; yet Germany possesses culture and the Germans are a culture people. He is really complaining that these fine ethical notions have never had any place in history. Such being the case, the true inference would be that they are unrealities and ought to be discarded altogether.

Rudeck can find, in the eighteenth century, only one act of the state which had an improving effect on "external morals." That was the abolition of obscene playing cards, and this improving effect was not won intentionally, but as an incidental consequence of a tax which was imposed for revenue. The case is interesting and instructive. It is thus alone that the state acts. It needs revenue and lays a tax. Other consequences follow. Sometimes "moral" consequences follow. The Methuen treaty caused Englishmen to drink port instead of claret for a hundred and fifty years, to the great increase of gout and drunkenness. The statesman might well be appalled if he should realize that he probably never can lay a tax without effects on industry, health, education, morals, and religion which he cannot foresee and cannot control. In the case of the cards, the consequence was favorable to good morals. That consequence was the purest accident. The state went on its way and got its revenue. The people met the effect through the mores and made the best of it, just as they did with the effects of the Methuen treaty. The cases are useful for a statesman to consider, when he needs to get revenue and the question by what taxes to get it is yet in his mind and _before_ him. When he has decided and acted it remains only to take the consequences, for, through the mores, they will enter into the web of life which the people are weaving and must endure. That web contains all the follies and errors, just as well as all the wisdom and all the achievements, of the past. The whole inheritance passes on together, including all the luck.

[1380] Ammianus Marcellinus, XXVIII, 4.

[1381] Darmstetter, _Zend-Avesta_, I, 100.

[1382] Marsden, _Sumatra_, 52.

[1383] Curr, _Austr. Race_, I, 109.

[1384] _Borneo's Wester-Afdeeling_, 251.

[1385] JAI, XII, 94, 135.

[1386] Schultz, _D. L._, 283.

[1387] Sieroshevski, _Yakuty_ (_Polish_), 342.

[1388] Holm, _Angmagslikerne_, 54.

[1389] Fritsch, _Eingeb. Sud-Afr._, 444.

[1390] _Amer. Antiq._, XXIV, 77.

[1391] _Une Femme chez les Sahariennes._

[1392] Bancroft, _Races of the Pacific_, I, 123; II, 676.

[1393] Kubary, _Soc. Einricht. der Pelauer_, 51, 55, 91.

[1394] _Palau_, 65, 324.

[1395] Cf. Christian, _Caroline Isl._, 290.

[1396] JAI, XV, 8; _U. S. Nat. Mus._, 1888, 339.

[1397] Duveyrier, _Touaregs du Nord_, 340, 429.

[1398] Rubruck, _Eastern Parts_, 79, Rockhill's note.

[1399] Sprenger, _Geographie Arabiens_, 97.