things, merely because they have become established as customs.

We often accept religious and social and political ideas in this way, without genuine investigation, merely because we have been accustomed to them, or because our early associations have been connected with them.

How frequently does the boy at twenty-one approve the politics of his father, and the girl at eighteen the religion of her mother! Do we usually make a careful and thorough investigation of the nature and tendencies of important social institutions, or do we accept them as having been tried and proved by our predecessors to be the best possible institutions for our needs? Many, very many of us, it is to be feared, are ultra-conservatives, and one of the greatest obstacles to social progress is conservatism, for it make cowards of us all.

The Houssa negroes, according to Herbert Spencer's Sociology, have a saying that is an appropriate motto for the extreme conservative. It is "Because same ting do for my father, same ting do for me."

The intensely conservative man thinks that what is, must be; that civilization has nearly if not quite reached its complete development; that if things are wrong in a few particulars, they will right themselves somehow ; that the rich may be too rich, but there's no way to prevent great riches; that the poor may be too poor, but there will always be poverty; that if the world has wagged for centuries under such conditions, it will probably continue to wag; and that as the wealth problem, according to his conception, does not concern him directly (for the ultraconservative is usually neither very poor nor very rich), he would rather not think about it.

The conservative is a great stickler for existing law

"Human beings, like patients, would rather endure well-known pains, with which they have become familiar, than take the chances of

and order, custom and precedent. He is terrified by a proposition to make a radical change of any kind. If a new law is to be enacted, he would make it a very little at a time. If an old law is to be abolished, he would destroy it piecemeal. If his grandfather put on his coat in a certain way, the conservative would like to continue the custom in the family. When his conservatism is mingled with conventionality, it is a matter of very great importance with him to wag exactly as the rest of the world wags-only a little behind it. If his neighbors all go to bed at exactly nine o'clock, he deems it a necessity for him to do precisely the same thing, and he would rather be dead than to have the reputation of thinking or saying or believing anything that his associates consider queer.

The conservative has a value in society, and imparts to it a certain desirable stability, but he is not the stuff out of which reformers are made, and but little can be said in his favor when a change in social institutions is needed, except to compare him to a brake upon the wheels of the car of state to prevent a dangerous rate of progress over rough ground. When his conservatism becomes so extreme that he will not listen to the pleas of progressionists, and when he persistently turns his face toward the past instead of the future, the only simile that adequately describes him is the rough political assertion of some of our campaigns, that he resembles "a jackass. hitched the wrong way between the shafts of a cart, and braying denunciations because the progressive combination is not a success."

The conservative worships his ancestors.

Perhaps

he does not do so consciously, but he feels a perpetual

a first-rate operation. They prefer a few timid efforts-and those at long intervals, slowly attempted and deliberately carried out-to secure their recovery."-M. REYBAUD.

reverence for whatever is well established or timehonored, and a corresponding distrust for anything contrary to what he and his fathers have practiced. If he positively knew, as the popular acceptation supposes the Darwinian theory to assert, that his remote ancestor was a monkey, the ultra conservative would immediately conclude that because his ancestor was ancient, he must, therefore, have been a very respectable monkey, and perhaps in many respects superior to himself.

Men of the conservative temperament so assiduously and so reverently gaze at the vanishing past, that they tumble helplessly into the pitfalls of the present. are surrounded by these dangers now; let us hope that the reverence with which we view time-honored institutions will not blind us to the necessities of a change. The tools and the fabrics of ancient existence are not those our condition now demands. We have outgrown many customs of antiquity, yet still some of them linger. Our wives and daughters have worn jewels in their ears, not because these really add to their comfort or beauty, but because a savage ancestor, somewhere in the dark ages before history was written, with a savage's idea of personal adornment, hung rings or sticks from her ears, and the custom has descended to the ladies who still follow it. Is it not probable, therefore, that we shall find in our social institutions many barbarous customs surviving far beyond the limits to which they should have been extended, just as the word "obey," as a pledge for the wife, has been retained in marriage ceremonies in significance of the time when woman was absolutely man's slave?

Instead of worshiping our ancestors and the social institutions they have bequeathed to us, after the fashion of extreme conservatism, the rational course in justice to ourselves is to scrutinize all their acts, and customs, and

laws, and traditions with the utmost suspicion. Without being unduly disrespectful to my ancestors, some of whom may have been very worthy people, I must say that, although I have no personal knowledge of their character and accomplishments, there is every reason to believe that, in general, they were like those of other people, a succession of brutal savages, whose brutality increased with their antiquity.

Indeed, we have very little real reason for claiming that we are civilized at the present moment, for civilization is only a relative condition. We have some reason for thinking that we are not quite such savage, stupid beasts as Caribs, for instance; and we may feel certain that we know more and treat one another more justly than did our forefathers a thousand years ago; but whether we are now really civilized or not-that is the question.

On that particular feature of the nineteenth century, what will the people two thousand years later think and write concerning us? Will they classify us as barbarians, or between the two eras will there intervene a period of social degeneration and a rise from which the people of the year 4000 will regard our condition as an ancient civilization rivaling their own? It is useless to speculate on the dim future, but we know at least this much : Our social institutions are continually changing, and they are no more stable now than they were five hundred years ago when our half-barbarous forefathers existed, or when, before the dawn of history, their ancestors lived in caves and chased the mammoth. Our civilization is not yet effected, and we are not really civilized in the sense that civilization is complete, but only in the sense that we have progressed from the condition of our ancestors, have learned many things which they did not know, have demanded many things which they did not think

necessary, and have abolished as unjust many practices which they did not think wrong.

Our natural condition is that of transition. The things that we may approve to-day, our successors may denounce to-morrow, and he who seeks to maintain by force a decaying social institution against the natural forces that tend to destroy it, as thousands of laws and customs have already been destroyed in the past, is merely endeavoring unwittingly to inflict upon the social structure a spasm such as convulsed this country when slavery gave way before advancing thought.

Do not forget that, if our savage ancestor' was like other savages, sometime in the four hundred thousand years of man's probable occupancy of earth he was a cannibal, devouring the enemy he had conquered; he was a child-murderer, destroying his own offspring lest its existence give him trouble; he was a parricide, putting his own mother to death when the infirmities of age interfered with her usefulness.

Under the same progress which is still going on, he ceased to murder his family and to eat his neighbors when he quarreled with them, but he, nevertheless, sold his own daughter to another savage for a slave, obtained his own slave wife or wives in the same way, and complacently made slaves of all others whom he could subject to his power, possibly because it was more profitable for him to enjoy the results of their servile labor than to enjoy their cooked flesh, perhaps because he became morally better then, as we do now. As a religious savage, he conceived it his duty to flay a captive alive and to dance before his deity wrapped in the bleeding skin of his victim.

In the arts of war he exulted in the facility with which he could remove the heads of his victims, when dead, and

' Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Sociology."