292 SOCIAL PROGRESS 



blood-brotherhood has widened into that of civic 

 relationship. Traditional custom has been shat- 

 tered by the expansion of industrial enterprise. 

 How, it may be asked, have these transformations 

 of feeling come about ? Partly, it would appear, 

 through the growing influence of self-conscious- 

 ness. But in greater measure through the imita- 

 tion of reformers, who have introduced new stand- 

 ards of conduct, and habits of mind, which, by 

 reinforcing the influence of particular impulses, 

 have profoundly modified man's valuations of 

 life. By the exercise of deference and kindness, 

 we subject ourselves more fully to our deferential 

 and kindly impulses, as by the practice of warfare 

 we have strengthened the authority of pugnacity, 

 cruelty and self-sacrifice. Have we, then, in reform- 

 ing zeal and the imitative propensity, a panacea for 

 everything that is injurious to human society, or 

 obstructs its development ? We may not take so 

 sanguine a view of human possibilities. The im- 

 pulses, with which we are born, subsist beneath the 

 grating which convention imposes upon them. 

 Habit, while, so to speak, regularizing their dis- 

 charges, leaves their essential strength unchanged. 

 We see that individual differs from individual, and 

 race from race, under similar conditions of culture. 

 An Englishman brought up from infancy amongst 

 savages would no doubt exhibit many fundamental 

 traits of Anglo-Saxon character : but we can 

 scarcely believe that he would be impelled or 

 restrained by any of the ideas which differentiate 

 the English from their barbarian forefathers. 



