Folkways. William Graham Sumner

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СКАЧАТЬ badness of mores consists entirely in their adjustment to the life conditions and the interests of the time and place (sec. 65). Therefore it is a sign of ease and welfare when no thought is given to the mores, but all coöperate in them instinctively. The nations of southeastern Asia show us the persistency of the mores, when the element of stability and rigidity in them becomes predominant. Ghost fear and ancestor worship tend to establish the persistency of the mores by dogmatic authority, strict taboo, and weighty sanctions. The mores then lose their naturalness and vitality. They are stereotyped. They lose all relation to expediency. They become an end in themselves. They are imposed by imperative authority without regard to interests or conditions (caste, child marriage, widows). When any society falls under the dominion of this disease in the mores it must disintegrate before it can live again. In that diseased state of the mores all learning consists in committing to memory the words of the sages of the past who established the formulæ of the mores. Such words are "sacred writings," a sentence of which is a rule of conduct to be obeyed quite independently of present interests, or of any rational considerations.

      84. Persistency. Asiatic fixity of the mores is extreme, but the element of persistency in the mores is always characteristic of them. They are elastic and tough, but when once established in familiar and continued use they resist change. They give stability to the social order when they are well understood, regular, and undisputed. In a new colony, with a sparse population, the mores are never fixed and stringent. There is great "liberty." As the colony always has traditions of the mores of the mother country, which are cherished with respect but are never applicable to the conditions of a colony, the mores of a colony are heterogeneous and are always in flux. That is because the colonists are all the time learning to live in a new country and have no traditions to guide them, the traditions of the old country being a hindrance. Any one bred in a new country, if he goes to an old country, feels the "conservatism" in its mores. He thinks the people stiff, set in their ways, stupid, and unwilling to learn. They think him raw, brusque, and uncultivated. He does not know the ritual, which can be written in no books, but knowledge of which, acquired by long experience, is the mark of fit membership in the society.

85. Persistency in spite of change of religion. Matthews saw votive effigies in Mandan villages just like those which Catlin had seen and put into his pictures seventy years before.90 In the meantime the Mandans had been nearly exterminated by war and disease, and the remnant of them had been civilized and Christianized. The mores of the Central American Indians inculcate moderation and restraint. Their ancient religion contained prescriptions of that character, and those prescriptions are still followed after centuries of life under Christianity.91 In the Bible we may see the strife between old mores and a new religious system two or three times repeated. The so-called Mosaic system superseded an older system of mores common, as it appears, to all the Semites of western Asia. The prophets preached a reform of the Jahveh religion and we find them at war with the inherited mores.92 The most striking feature of the story of the prophets is their antagonism to the mores which the people would not give up. Monotheism was not established until after the captivity.93 The recurrence, vitality, popularity, and pervasiveness of traditional mores are well shown in the Bible story. The result was a combination of ritual monotheism with survivals of ancient mores and a popular religion in which demonism was one of the predominant elements. The New Testament represents a new revival and reform of the religion. The Jews to this day show the persistency of ancient mores. Christianity was a new adjustment of both heathen and Jewish mores to a new religious system. The popular religion once more turned out to be a grand revival of demonism. The masses retained their mores with little change. The mores overruled the religion. Therefore Jewish Christians and heathen Christians remained distinguishable for centuries. The Romans never could stamp out the child sacrifices of the Carthaginians.94 The Roman law was an embodiment of all the art of living and the mores of the Roman people. It differed from the mores of the German peoples, and when by the religion the Roman system was brought to German people conflict was produced. In fact, it may be said that the process of remolding German mores by the Roman law never was completed,95 and that now the German mores have risen against the Roman law and have accepted out of it only what has been freely and rationally selected. Marriage amongst the German nations was a domestic and family function. Even after the hierocratic system was firmly established, it was centuries before the ecclesiastics could make marriage a clerical function.96 In the usages of German peasants to-day may be found numerous survivals of heathen notions and customs.97 In England the German mores accepted only a limited influence from the Roman law. The English have adopted the policy of the Romans in dealing with subject peoples. They do not meddle with local customs if they can avoid it. This is wise, since nothing nurses discontent like interference with folkways. The persistency of the mores is often shown in survivals—senseless ceremonies whose meaning is forgotten, jests, play, parody, and caricature, or stereotyped words and phrases, or even in cakes of a prescribed form or prescribed foods at certain festivals.

86. Roman law. In the Roman law everything proceeds from the emperor. He is the possessor of all authority, the fountain of honor, the author of all legislation, and the referee in all disputes. Lawyers trained by the study of this code learned to conceive of all the functions of the state as acts, powers, and rights of a monarchical sovereign. They stood beside the kings and princes of the later Middle Ages ready to construe the institutions of suzerainty into this monarchical form. They broke down feudalism and helped to build the absolutist dynastic state, wherever the Roman law was in force, and wherever it had greatly influenced the legal system. The church also had great interest to employ the Roman law, because it included the ecclesiastical legislation of the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries, and because the canon law was imitated from it in spirit and form. In all matters of private rights the provisions of the Justinian code were good and beneficial, so that those provisions won their own way by their own merit.98 In the Sachsenspiegel there was no distinction of property between man and wife, but this meant that all which both had was a joint capital for use in their domestic economy. When the marriage was dissolved the property returned to the side from which it came. Later, in many districts, this arrangement developed into a real community of goods under various forms. "It was in regard to these adjustments of property rights that the jurists of the Middle Ages did most harm by introducing the Roman law, for it was especially in regard to this matter that the Roman law stood in strongest contrast to the German notions, and the resistance of the German people is to be seen in the numerous local systems of law, which remained in use in most of Germany; unfortunately not everywhere, nor uniformly."99

87. The Roman law: its effect on later mores. Throughout the north of Europe, upon conversion to Christianity, tithes were the stumbling-block between the old mores and the new system.100 The authority for the tithe system came from the Roman system. It was included in the Roman jurisprudence which the church adopted and carried wherever it extended. After the civil code was revived it helped powerfully to make states. This was a work, however, which was hostile to the church. The royal lawyers found in the civil code a system which referred everything in society to the emperor as the origin of power, rights, and honor. They adopted this standpoint for the kings of the new dynastic states and, in the might of the Roman law, they established royal absolutism, which was unfavorable to the church and the feudal nobles. They found their allies in the cities which loved written law, institutions, and defined powers. Stubbs101 regards the form of the Statute of Westminster СКАЧАТЬ