accorded, in modern England, to a girl who has married her deceased sister's husband, and to the children of that marriage. And as the divergence from code approaches greater proportions, the penalties increase; witness the treatment accorded the Mormons in this country, the adherents of free love, "absolute motherhood," and so on. Note the change that came over the spirit of the reception accorded to Gorky, the Russian writer, when it was discovered that the woman who was travelling with him was not Madame Gorky. Certainly this supreme among the passions is subject to control and direction; and the strongest and most compelling control does not lie in written statute, as any one can see who reflects upon the topic, but in convention. Convention penetrates where statutes are not; and enacted laws are no more than the crystallization of certain of the more tangible manifestations of convention. If, now, realizing that there are deep-lying forces of societal control, we can get at the nature of the laws that determine convention, or, at least, at the nature of convention, we are approaching the fundamentals of societal laws, and so of societal evolution. It is important here to note the distinction between convention and instinct, for it is significant of the distinction between organic and societal evolution. By convention I mean a piece of behavior that is learned, and by instinct one that is inborn instinctive. Convention is "second-nature"; instinct, "first-nature." The relation between the two is summarily expressed by saying that convention consistently represses instinct. Brief illustration will present this point. Sneezing is natural enough, but convention taboos it, and conventional people have learned to reduce the paroxysm from an explosion to a delicate Sneezing is as instinctive or natural murmur. a happening as one could well find, but even the most hardened unconventional would try to repress himself if the impulse came at a tense and solemn point of, say, some religious service. If he did not, he would feel the disapproval of those about him. It will be noted that he would have no occasion for repression if he were alone. Robinson Crusoe could be entirely unconventional before Friday came. That which is natural, and so innocent, becomes a fault in society - a fact which reveals the essential truth that convention belongs to societal, not natural evolution. A child comes into the world, despite the expression "to the manner born," without the beginning of manners. Line upon line and precept upon precept are necessary before he is fit to associate with his fellow-men on terms that do not include the overlooking of his manners. All the conventions taught him, from the time he is made to eat with some implement other than his fingers, until he learns to behave courteously in any sort of surroundings, are repressive of the instincts-all the way from that one which bids him seize and gorge like an animal up to that of an undisciplined selfishness, in the presence of which real courtesy is impossible. But these conventions are the rules of the game for living in society. No game is worth anything, or pleasurable, or even endurable, which has not its code of conduct; otherwise it runs down into chaos and rough-and-tumble. However, no one made these conventions; they grew up automatically where men lived together. The society, living its life, has imposed, as it were, rules upon its members and a discipline whose absence means anarchy and confusion. The repression of this discipline occasionally leads to revolt, but if the society is to live, it presently settles down to a new code of conventions, which is again enforced with the elemental stress characteristic of society's coercion. For behind any such code, as its ultimate guarantee, is the public opinion of the groupmembers, dead as well as living. This is the force behind all conventions, and, of course, behind all laws, if they are effective. Hence if we wish to get down to fundamentals and so arrive at the hidden springs of societal life and evolution, we must seek them in the societal conventions and in public opinion. In mentioning, in a former connection, several important works touching on evolution in society, nothing was said of a book which develops what seems to a growing body of us to be the connecting idea between organic and societal evolution, or, rather, the fundamental phenomenon of the latter as it diverges from the former into its own phase and mode. This idea is the conception of the "folkways" and "mores" developed by the late William Graham Sumner.1 No adequate notion of the folkways can be gained apart from the study of this author's analysis, with its supporting compendium of illustra 1 In "Folkways, a Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals." tion; but it is yet possible to get before us the conception of the folkways in its broadest lines. If we recall certain of the salient points of preceding pages, we see that the course of human evolution is the course of civilization. But civilization is a matter of the development of inventions, systems, economies, and so on of what may be termed, in a broad sense, institutions. In their developed form these institutions are very complex and difficult to handle; but they must have had some simple and informal beginnings and lowest terms (which could be dealt with more readily) in some sort of simple and habitual, unconscious, automatic, unpremeditated reactions upon surroundings. We find such habitudes represented in the conventions, particularly in those of primitive peoples, of which we have been talking. Now here is where the conception of the folkways fits in; as a natural and essential societal form the folkway is analogous to the germ or embryo. It is less derived and more primordial. Folkways represent the lowest terms or matrix of the institutions, whose aggregate, civilization or culture, we have seen to be the external measure and projection of the human type of |