SOCIETAL EVOLUTION 147 



ennial revolution," as an American election has been called, 

 is a conflict of interests rather than one of state-craft: debtors 

 versus creditors, ins versus outs. How can the masses pass 

 intelligently on an issue like that of the tariff or the gold 

 standard, when it takes a super-expert to understand them? 

 Add to this the thick-and-thin adherence to party, the shufflings 

 and compromises of leaders, the personal animosities, the cam- 

 paign of emotional propaganda, and what becomes of the 

 election as an agency of rational selection between proposed 

 adjustments to the nation's life-conditions? 



The fact is that there are a number of phases of any nation's 

 code which are beyond the pale even of criticism; reason is not 

 invited to scrutinize them, and if it attempts to do so, it is 

 roughly bidden to desist. There are plenty of details in any 

 code of mores which we cling to with as deep emotion as the 

 savage shows for his medicine-bag, and which it would be 

 sacrilege to submit to the searchings of reason. One cannot 

 expect rational selection in the field of religion, nor of marriage 

 and the family. The Mohammedan is not ready to analyze 

 the merits and demerits of Islam, and abide by the results; nor 

 the monogamist to make a cold-blooded study of the merits 

 and demerits of pair-marriage. The people love one public 

 figure, and overlook or smile at his defects ; they hate another, 

 and jeer at or misrepresent his virtues. Where feeling is 

 strong, reason counts for little. It is cynically said that the 

 chief function of the human mind is to think up reasons for 

 doing what one wants to do, or to find good reasons for having 

 done what one wanted to do. 



These considerations may seem dismal to one who would 

 like to believe that men think out society's destiny; but they do 

 not seem discouraging to one who believes that the operation 

 of the big, impersonal, automatically working forces always 

 gets truer results than do the feeble powers of the human 

 mind; that natural law is far more reliable than men's enact- 



