352 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



marked influence upon our political and social institutions. Here dif- 

 ferences in customs and traditions produce effects similar to those which 

 result from differences in color. 



The tradition that woman should remain in the home, that her 

 sphere is the restricted one of the household, is an almost insurmount- 

 able obstacle in the path of the woman-suffrage movement. This moss- 

 covered, but orthodox, tradition greatly weakens the effect of the eco- 

 nomic forces which are acting to place woman on an economic and 

 political basis level with that occupied by the masculine sex; and thus 

 it retards a development which is indigenous to an industrial community 

 of the occidental type. Human beings are prone to argue on the basis 

 of what has been rather than on the ground of what is. Men hold that 

 good which is customary forgetting that good is always relative to 

 present conditions. Past good is often present evil; and present vices, 

 past virtues. 



Law# shortening the working day for men and women, regulating 

 dangerous employments, and permitting the activities of labor unions, 

 are met by an appeal to personal liberty of a kind which is practically 

 meaningless in modern industrial society. Traditional rights are often 

 valueless when studied in the light of the present; but their potency 

 comes from the fact that their appeal is to the emotions, not to the 

 reason, or to class interest rather than to the general welfare or to race 

 improvement. A highly protective tariff is carried down into a time 

 when the primary motive for such regulation is lost, by means of the 

 pressure of certain pecuniary interests built up in a measure by the 

 tariff law itself. 



Religious ideals are utilized frequently to retard social change. Re- 

 ligious imperatives and biblical phraseology are invoked to continue 

 the traditional view as to marriage and divorce. The standard of the 

 formalist is that of religious justification or taboo rather than of social 

 welfare; and the particularly unfortunate element in the whole matter 

 is that the average formalist never grasps the idea that his religious 

 imperatives were built up in the past when economic and social condi- 

 tions were very different from those of to-day. The thoroughgoing for- 

 malist is obsessed by the idea of fixity in all moral, ethical and religious 

 ideals and requirements. He is unfortunately so insistent upon up- 

 holding a fixed and authoritative ideal of individual goodness or of 

 individual conformity to certain doctrines or ceremonial forms that he 

 can not see the intricacy and complexity of modern social relations and 

 the potency of environmental reaction upon the character and ideals of 

 individual members of society. The religious formalist is a conserva- 

 tive; he is prone to look askance upon the sociologist who is studying 

 the great social cauldron as the chemist examines his test-tube or the 

 biologist the organism under the lens of his microscope. The sociolo- 



