The Group Mind Part 19

Some observers have maintained that history will pa.s.s the same verdict upon modern France, and that most of our leading nations of the present day are seriously threatened by the same danger.

Any long continued progressive evolution of the mind of a people has been, then, a rare exception in the history of the world; partly because the free play of the spirit of inquiry and of the intellectual faculties, which is the source of all progress, exerts a socially disruptive tendency, so that progress is by its very nature dangerous to the stability of any nation; but partly also because the free play of the spirit of inquiry has been so rarely achieved or permitted, so that even such progress as has led on to social disruption has been exceptional.

A long period of intellectual and moral stagnation in the rigid bonds of custom and religion has been the rule for nearly all the peoples of the earth, so soon as they had attained to a settled mode of existence. The primary question, then, to be answered in seeking to account for the progress of nations, is-What conditions enabled the spirit of inquiry to break the bonds of custom and religion and to extend man's knowledge of man and of the world in which he lives?

Bagehot, in considering more particularly the progress of political inst.i.tutions, put the problem in much the same way. He pointed out that the first age of the life of nations is always an age dominated by custom resting on unquestioned religious sanctions; an age in which there is often a vast amount of discussion of detail, as, for example, discussion of the details of military expeditions, but never discussion of principles; and he maintained that an age marked by the discussion of principles, involving the questioning of traditions, moral and intellectual, initiates and characterises every period of progress.

There is much to be said for the view that the most important condition of progress in its earlier stages was in most cases, perhaps in all, the conquest of a more primitive people by one more advanced in culture or of superior racial type, who remained to settle in the conquered territory, and, not driving out or exterminating the conquered inhabitants, established themselves as a governing cla.s.s. History and archaeology show that this occurred at least once in most of the areas where nations have developed spontaneously to any considerable degree; the earliest known instances being those of Egypt and Chaldea as long as ten thousand years ago. The same thing occurred again in India, and later still in Greece; and throughout early European history the process was frequently repeated in various areas. Every one of the modern peoples of Europe has been formed through such fusion by conquest of two peoples, in some instances several times repeated; and, though none of these modern European peoples originated their own civilisations, but largely took over by imitation the civilisation ready made for them by the more precocious peoples of Asia and by Greece and Rome, these fusions and the resultant composite character of the European peoples no doubt have tended greatly to promote progress. And it is easy to see how in several ways such a fusion by conquest of two peoples must have tended to set free the spirit of inquiry, that prime condition of progress. Three of these seem to have been of chief importance.

The most obvious way in which progress has been promoted was that the conquering invaders became a leisured aristocracy, having their material needs supplied by the labour of the indigenous population, which became a more or less servile cla.s.s. All the ancient civilisations were thus founded upon servile labour. We may be sure that, until such a social system resulted from conquest, no people made much progress; because all individuals were fully occupied in securing their means of subsistence, either by warfare, by the tending of herds, or by agriculture. Each people was self-supporting, and knew no or few needs beyond those which their own labour was able to supply; and labour was individual, or was co-operative only among small groups, such as the communal family groups. It could, therefore, undertake no great works, whether of building or engineering, such as large public buildings, irrigation, or road making. Each family consumed what it produced, and consequently there was no large acc.u.mulation of capital; for there were no motives for storing up their primitive wealth, and generally no wealth of durable and storable form.

But, as soon as a ruling cla.s.s could dispose of the labour of a large part of the population, making them work for a mere subsistence wage, there was initiated that regime of capital and labour on which, up to the present time, all civilisation has been founded. Wealth was acc.u.mulated; great works, such as the pyramids, demanding enormous expenditure of human life and work, could be undertaken; and a leisured cla.s.s was created, which, being freed from the necessity of bodily toil, was able to turn its energy to speculative inquiry, to the enjoyment of art and luxury, to directing and organising the labour of the mult.i.tude, to inventing the tools that render labour more effective, to studying natural phenomena such as the cycle of the seasons, a more accurate knowledge of which added to the productivity of labour; for it was in the service of wealth production, that in the main science arose, especially mathematics and mechanical and astronomical science, arithmetic and geometry through the need of a practical art of measurement, astronomical science through the need of foreseeing the seasons.

The desire to enjoy art and luxury is one which feeds itself and grows, when once aroused; and it was these growing desires of the leisured and wealthy cla.s.ses which created trade, or at any rate first developed it beyond the merest rudiments; and in doing so led to regular and friendly intercourse between nations.

A second very important result of such fusion by conquest must have been the breaking up to some extent of custom and the weakening of the religious sanctions. Under the new regime, both the conquering and the conquered peoples would find their old customs unsuited to their novel social relations, and inadequate to regulate their changed occupations.

The old customs of both would inevitably be thrown into the melting pot; at the same time the religious sanctions of both would be weakened by the intimate contact of two systems, neither of which, in the presence of a rival system, would henceforth be able to claim unquestioned authority, until one had suppressed the other or a stable synthesis of the two had been effected. So long as each individual never had intercourse with any but those who accepted the national or tribal religion, it was well-nigh impossible for anyone to question its authority; but as soon as the devotees of two religions lived intermixed, the question-Which religion was true? must inevitably have arisen in some minds. The weight of custom and of religious sanctions, which lies so heavily on a primitive society, restricting all enterprise, forbidding inquiry and repressing the use of the intellectual powers, would thus be lightened and scope be given for experiment in thought and action. And either people, coming into more or less intimate contact for the first time with a system of beliefs and customs and inst.i.tutions other than their own, must have been led to compare, discuss, and reflect upon these things; the sceptical spirit and the intellect must have been greatly stimulated. There must have been a conflict of ideas and the initiation of an age of discussion. In short such a fusion by conquest must have broken up what Bagehot calls the 'cake of custom' as nothing else could, and so have rendered the intellectual and moral traditions once more plastic and capable of progress.

No doubt in many cases such disintegration of the old systems went too far, and the society, before it could evolve anew a sufficiently strong and adequate system of customs and sanctions, went to pieces. In modern times many primitive societies have been broken up and destroyed in just this way-namely, their customs and the religious sanctions of their morality have been undermined and weakened by the contact of the more complex systems of civilised men, and they have not been able to a.s.similate the new system rapidly enough to enable it effectively to replace their own shaken and decaying code.

A third way in which the fusion by conquest of two peoples must have made for progress was by biological blending, the crossing by intermarriage of the two stocks. We have seen that there is a considerable amount of evidence to show that, when two stocks are very widely different in mental and physical characters, the result of crossing is likely to be bad, the crossed race is likely to be inferior to, and less fit for the battle of life than, both parental stocks; the characters of individuals will be apt to be made up of a number of elements more or less inconsistent with one another; such a composite character made up of inharmonious elements will be apt to be unstable and constantly at war with itself. Character of this kind and the tragic struggles to which it is liable to find itself committed has been well described in fiction by a number of authors, especially in stories of the Mulattoes of America. On the physical side it has been shown that such cross-bred races tend to die out owing to lack of balance of the physical const.i.tution.

On the other hand, we saw that the crossing of two closely allied racial stocks seems to have a tendency to produce a cross-bred race superior to both parent stocks, and especially to produce a variable stock. It is, I think, probable that the frequently repeated blending of allied stocks in Europe has been the fundamental biological condition of the capacity of the European peoples for progressive national life.

In the case of the conquest of one people by another differing very markedly in racial qualities, there seem to be two alternatives equally prejudicial to the continued progress of the nation so formed. On the one hand, free intermarriage may take place, resulting in an inferior cross-bred race incapable of high civilisation, as seems to have occurred in most of the countries of South America, where it is with the greatest difficulty that the outward forms of the high civilisation which they have imitated from Europe are maintained. On the other hand, where especially the outward physical characters are very different, the conquering people may hold itself apart from the conquered, and maintain itself as a ruling cla.s.s, which prides itself on the purity of its blood and which tends to harden into a caste. Such conquest without subsequent blending gives rise to a civilisation which, being founded upon a rigid caste system, is incapable of continued progress. This is what has happened in India. The fair-skinned Aryan invaders despised the dark-skinned indigenous peoples, whom they spoke of as being scarcely human, and, in spite of a good deal of crossing, they have in theory and in the case of the Brahmans at least to a considerable extent in practice, maintained the purity of their blood, by means of the development of the caste system.

Europe on the other hand was fortunate in that all the different peoples, or most of the peoples, from which its nations have been formed were of allied race; they were all, with few exceptions, of the white race, sufficiently nearly allied not to produce inferior cross-races but rather to produce some superior subraces. The conquered peoples have been so similar to their conquerors in physical type that crossing could take place without the cross-bred offspring bearing the indelible marks of inferior or mixed parentage, such as a dark skin or a woolly head.

Hence, although caste systems were formed, they did not prove rigid; free intermarriage took place, and it was not impossible for individuals of the conquered race or of the mixed stock to rise into the superior ruling cla.s.s. The importance of this may be seen, on reflecting how the merest trace of negro-blood in individuals of mixed origin in North America is apt to show itself in the physical features and how, even in that enlightened and Christian country, a trace so revealed suffices to condemn a man, no matter how great his powers or refined his character, to remain a member of the inferior caste.

But, apart from the possible improvement of the racial qualities of the whole people, or of the average individuals in general, which may well have occurred in Europe, the biological blending of allied races may give important advantages to the resulting people in another way-namely, by increasing its variability, the variability of its mental qualities.

If a people is extremely h.o.m.ogeneous in the racial sense, it may be expected to display little variability, its members will be of essentially similar mental qualities and of a uniform level of mental capacity; and this will tend to make them a very stable, but a very conservative unprogressive, nation. This seems to be true of China, and to be in large part the source of its extreme stability and extreme conservatism.

Where, on the other hand, a people is formed by the intimate blending by intermarriage of two or more racial stocks, it is likely to be a variable one; there will be large departures in many directions from the average type of mental ability, and there will be individuals varying by excess of development of various capacities as well as others varying by defect of development.

And a people of variable and therefore widely diversified mental capacities will, even though its average capacity is no greater than that of a more h.o.m.ogeneous people, be more likely to make progress in civilisation, and this for three reasons.

First, variability is the essential condition of all race progress by biological adaptation; for it is by the selection of variations, the survival and multiplication of types varying in certain directions in larger proportions than the average type, that all race progress and adaptation seems to have been achieved. Hence, increased variability, resulting from the blending of races, will render a people so formed capable of race progress and of more rapid adaptation; for example, in the peoples of Northern Europe it would have favoured the adaptation of the const.i.tutions of the people to the severity of the climate and to those peculiar social conditions which, as we have seen reason to believe, have been the source of their unique combination of qualities.

Secondly, variability of mental qualities would be favourable to the coming of the age of discussion; for in such a people custom would rule with less force, its sway would be more apt to be questioned and disputed, than among a highly h.o.m.ogeneous people.

Thirdly, and this is probably the most important manner in which race blending has favoured the progress of nations, among the variations from the average type produced by race crossing would be men of exceptional capacities in various directions.

We have already noted that all progress of the intellectual and moral traditions eventually depends upon the activities of men of exceptional powers of various kinds, upon the great religious or ethical teacher, the inventor, the artist, the discoverer. A people may, like the Chinese, have a high average capacity of intellectual ability; but, if it cannot from time to time produce men of far more than average capacity along various lines, it will not progress very far spontaneously. Exceptional intellectual capacity is, however, a variation from the type, as the biologists say, just such as may be expected to result from race blending; there will be, among the variations in all directions, variations in the direction of exceptional capacity of various kinds. Hence a nation of blended variable stocks will, other things being the same, be far more likely to be capable of continued evolution than a h.o.m.ogeneous people of equal average mental capacity, among whom few men are capable of rising to any distinguished height.

This view of the effects of race blending is borne out empirically by the comparison of the peoples of the world. The European peoples have been the most progressive, and they, more than all others, have been formed by repeated blendings of allied stocks. Within Europe it is the peoples among whom this blending has been carried furthest who have proved most progressive-the French, the English, and the Italian; and, conversely, the least blended peoples have been the most backward, and have contributed least to the general progress of civilisation in Europe; for example the large, almost purely Slav, population which forms the bulk of the Russian nation.

We pa.s.s on to consider other conditions which have contributed to setting free and stimulating the spirit of inquiry. We have seen that physical environment played a predominant part in moulding the mental qualities of races in the prehistoric period. And we must recognise that, although with the beginning of settled national life it probably ceased to modify race-qualities to any considerable extent, it has yet been important in favouring the rapid evolution of the intellectual tradition of some peoples, and this in several ways. First, by its direct influence upon the minds of individuals. Buckle and others have pointed out that, while, in India and throughout a great part of Asia, the physical environment was unfavourable to intellectual progress, while its vast and terrible aspects fertilised the superst.i.tion of the people, and repressed the spirit of inquiry by rendering hopeless any attempt to cope with its terrific displays of force, in Europe and especially in South and Western Europe, the comparatively small scale on which the physical features are planned and the relative feebleness of the forces of nature encouraged men to adopt a bolder att.i.tude towards them.

Buckle, contrasting Greece with India in this respect, showed how the physical features of both countries were reflected in their national cultures; how, while the Hindus cringed in fear before monstrous and cruel G.o.ds, the Greeks fashioned their G.o.ds in their own image, simply personifying each leading human attribute, and made of them a genial family of beings, differing from men and women in little but their immortality and their superior facilities for the enjoyment of life. In general the buoyancy and serenity of the Greek att.i.tude towards life and nature reflected the beautiful, secure and diversified aspects of their physical environment. In such an atmosphere the spirit of inquiry would naturally flourish more freely than where man's spirit was oppressed by the fear of terrible and uncontrollable forces and where he was made to feel too keenly the limitations of his mental and physical powers.

Buckle summed up his review of these effects as follows:-"In the civilisations exterior to Europe, all nature conspired to increase the authority of the imaginative faculties and to weaken the authority of the reasoning ones. In Europe has operated a law the reverse of this, by virtue of which the tendency of natural phenomena is, on the whole, to limit the imagination, and embolden the understanding; thus inspiring man with confidence in his own resources, and facilitating the increase of his knowledge, by encouraging that bold, inquisitive and scientific spirit, which is constantly advancing and on which all future progress must depend."

I think we must accept this view of the importance of the direct action of physical environment on the minds of individuals. To deny, as Hegel did, the important influence of physical environment upon the development of Greek culture, because the Turks have enjoyed a similar climate without producing a similar culture, is unreasonable. The progress of civilisation has always been the result of a multiplicity of causes and conditions; and we cannot deny all importance to any one, whether race or climate or social organisation or religion or any other, because in some particular instance it has failed to produce the progress of which in other instances it has been one of a number of co-operating causes.

The diversity and small scale of the physical features of South and Western Europe has favoured the progress of the intellectual tradition in another important way. The land is divided by natural barriers into a number of natural territories, the population of each of which has naturally tended to become one nation and to develop a national culture.

In this way there arose a number of nations and States in close proximity with one another, yet each developing along its own lines.

When the development of wealth and commerce brought these diversified cultures into friendly intercourse with one another, the exchange of ideas and the general imitation of the useful arts of one people by its neighbours must have made very strongly for progress; the culture of each of a group of neighbouring peoples no longer progressed only by the addition of the ideas and inventions of its own exceptional intellects, but each group had the opportunity of selecting and imitatively adopting whatever seemed to them best among the ideas, the arts and inventions of the neighbouring peoples.

It is generally admitted that this was one of the main conditions of the rapid development of the culture of the ancient Greeks, situated as they were within easy reach of several of the oldest civilisations, those of Egypt and of South-Eastern Asia; they were also within reach of a number of less civilised peoples, and therefore enjoyed opportunities for trade of a kind which, being peculiarly lucrative, has in all ages hastened the acquisition of wealth and capital and stimulated the development of commerce. All the most progressive European peoples have enjoyed similar advantages; and it has been maintained with some plausibility that the princ.i.p.al cause of the shifting of the centre of progressive civilisation from the Eastern Mediterranean to the west of Europe has been the improvement of the art of navigation and the discovery of the New World and of the sea route to Asia and the East Indies; for these gave the western countries the most advantageous positions for the conduct of a world wide commerce. No doubt the factor mentioned has been important in producing this change.

But, when we consider the ancient European civilisations and compare them with our own, we realize that, in spite of all the circ.u.mstances which we have enumerated and briefly considered as factors stimulating the spirit of inquiry and making for progress of their intellectual tradition, and in spite of their brilliant and in some respects unapproachable achievements, they were nevertheless radically incapable of continued progress. Greek civilisation certainly progressed at a marvellous rate for some centuries; yet there is every reason to believe that it bore within itself the inevitable causes of its ultimate decay or stagnation. And, when we consider Roman civilisation, we see that, through all the long centuries of the greatness of Rome, it was essentially unprogressive. There was no continued evolution of the national mind and character. Save in respect to the single province of law, Roman civilisation, when it entered upon the period of its decay, had not appreciably progressed in any essential respects beyond the stage reached more than a thousand years earlier. Rome was in fact less truly a nation in its later than in its earlier age. It had superficially imitated rather more of Greek culture and it had incorporated a number of bizarre elements from the many peoples which had been brought under the sway of the Roman sceptre; but neither in religion, nor in philosophy, nor art, nor science, nor in any of the practical modes of controlling the forces of nature, had it made any substantial gains; and its social organisation tended more and more to the type of a centralised irresponsible bureaucracy[145].

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in the last thousand years the nations of Western Europe have made immense progress; nor that this progress has been accelerating from century to century in a way which seemed to reach a climax in the wonderful century just closed; though there appears good prospect of continued progress and perhaps of continued acceleration throughout the century to come and perhaps for many more.

What then is the cause of this great difference between the civilisation of Western Europe and all preceding civilisations? The difference is, I think, essentially due to difference of social organisation. As argued in a previous chapter, social organisation was of less influence in the earlier ages, but has a.s.sumed a constantly increasing importance throughout the evolution of civilisation; and it is now predominant over all other conditions. We must, then, first define this difference of social organisation; secondly, we must show how it makes for progress; and thirdly, conjecture how the social organisation of Western Europe, so favourable to the continued development of nations, has been brought about.

The great difference which divides the social organisation of the modern progressive peoples from that of all the ancient European civilisations is that, under it, the individual enjoys greater liberty and more securely founded rights as against the community, and as against all other individuals. This change is summed up in Sir H. Maine's dictum that "the movement of progressive societies has. .h.i.therto been a movement from status to contract."

All the ancient civilised societies, Greece and Rome no less than all the others, rested upon the fundamental a.s.sumption of the absolute supremacy of the State, the a.s.sumption that the individual existed only for the State and that the welfare of the State was the supreme end to which all individual rights and liberties must be subordinated absolutely, was the end to the securing of which all custom, and all law, all social and family relations and inst.i.tutions and religion itself were but the means. And the State was a politico-religious organisation, membership of which implied the blood-relationship of its citizens and a common partic.i.p.ation in the state-religion; while the State G.o.ds were conceived as being themselves ancestors, or in some other way kinsmen, of the citizens[146]. This bond of blood or kinship between the members of the State and its G.o.ds went back to the earliest times. It is the rule of almost all savage peoples; and the religious rites of many include some rite symbolising or renewing this blood bond, such as smearing the blood of the kinsmen on the altars of the G.o.ds, or drinking the blood of some animal which is held to be the symbolic representative of the G.o.d. And the supreme end of the State itself was the increase of its own power and stability, through the exercise of military power and through military conquest.

All human beings outside the State, outside this moral-politico-religious-bond, were regarded as _prima facie_ enemies of the State, without rights of any sort, without even the slightest claim to humane treatment. Hence, in war the slaughter of the conquered was the rule; and the practice of making slaves of prisoners of war and of conquered peoples only arose through its profitableness, and was regarded as a great concession to the victims, whose natural fate was sudden death. Under this system, which inevitably became to some extent a caste system, with a caste of freemen or citizens ruling over slaves, each individual was born to a certain status as a member of a particular family. His position and duties and rights in the family were rigidly prescribed by custom, and the law took account only of the relations of the family to the State.

CHAPTER XX

THE PROGRESS OF NATIONS IN THEIR MATURITY

In the foregoing chapter we have noted the great fact that the leading modern nations of Western Europe have shown a much greater capacity for progress than all the earlier civilised peoples, not excepting those of ancient Greece and Rome. I urged that this difference between the ancient and the modern European civilisations seemed to be chiefly due to a difference of social organisation. I pointed out how the older nations were essentially caste nations, resting on a basis of slavery, and how all individual rights were entirely subordinated to the welfare of the State, a politico-religious organisation held together by the bond of kinship; how, within that organisation, the rights of each person were strictly defined throughout his life by the status to which he was born; and how all persons outside this organisation were regarded as natural enemies, towards whom no obligations of any kind were felt.

We have now to notice that the form of social organisation towards which all the leading modern nations have been tending, and which some of them have now pretty well achieved, is one in which the last vestiges of the caste system and the rigid bonds of customary status are rapidly being abolished. In this new organisation social cla.s.ses persist, but they are no longer castes; all members of the nation are regarded as being by nature free and equal; a career is open to every talent, and any man may rise to any position by the exertion of his abilities. His position is one of extreme liberty as compared with that of any member of the ancient nations. He has definite rights as against the State. The State claims only a minimum of rights over him, the right to prevent him interfering with the rights of his fellow-citizens, the right to make him pay for his share of the privileges conveyed by its activities. And these rights it claims in virtue of contract between each citizen and all the rest. For each citizen is free to throw off his allegiance to the State and to leave it at will, and his continuance as a citizen of the State implies his acceptance of the contract.

Even in religion, personal liberty has at last been achieved; religion is no longer a State-religion, the G.o.ds are no longer the national G.o.ds, and each man may accept any religion or none. This is the most striking instance of the immense distance, as regards the liberty of the individual, that divides the modern from the ancient nations. For with the latter, the function of religion was to preserve the security of the State; and to question it in any way was to threaten the State, a principle fully acted upon by Athens in the time of her highest enlightenment and glory.

The change is very striking also as regards the att.i.tude of the citizens of one State towards those of any other and towards even the members of savage and barbarous communities. We no longer regard ourselves as devoid of all obligation towards such persons. Rather we tend to treat them as having equal rights with ourselves, the few specifically national rights excepted, and as having equal claims with our fellow citizens upon our considerate feeling and conduct towards them.

The relations of individuals are, then, tending to be regulated, on the one hand, by contractual justice; on the other hand, by the moral obligation felt by each individual, an obligation not enforced by any exercise of the power of the State, but supported only by public opinion. The end we set before ourselves is no longer the welfare of the State, to be attained at any cost to individual liberty; it is rather an ideal of justice for every person, to which the welfare of the State must be, if necessary, subordinated. In short, instead of maintaining universal intolerance, we have made great strides towards universal tolerance.

All this represents a profound change of social organisation, a great advance in social evolution. That it is intimately bound up with the progressiveness of a people is shown by the fact that the degree to which the change has proceeded among the various nations runs parallel with their progress in all the essentials of civilisation. The change seems, indeed, to be one of the princ.i.p.al conditions of the progress of the nations of Western Europe and, we may add, of the American nation, by which it has been carried further than by any other. How, then, does it make for progress? We may answer this question by considering how the social system which has given place to this new kind of social organisation-namely, the caste system-renders progress difficult or impossible.

Where the caste system is highly developed and rigidly maintained, as among the Hindus of India, its conservative unprogressive tendency is obvious enough. Each man is born a member of some one of many castes, and he can never hope to pa.s.s from one caste to another and higher caste. That fact alone removes at once the two greatest spurs to effort, the two most powerful motives that urge on the members of our modern societies to the fullest development and exercise of all their faculties; namely, the desire to rise in the social scale and to place one's children at a more advantageous starting point in the battle of life, and the fear of falling back in the social scale, of sinking to a lower level, with the consequent sacrifice of all the social consideration and other advantages which one's position at any given social level brings with it. Under the Hindu caste system, the poor Brahmin who has no possessions, perhaps not even a rag to cover his nakedness, is sure of the social consideration which his birth gives him, both for himself and his children. He can look disdainfully upon the rich man and the prince of lower caste; and public opinion approves and supports him. This perhaps is the most important way in which the caste system prevents progress. But there are others almost equally serious.

The occupations open to the members of each caste are rigidly limited.

The members of one caste must be priests only, of another soldiers only, of another scavengers, of another potters, and so on. Now, if it were true that, when dexterities or mental powers generally are specially developed by use, the improvements of faculty resulting from this long practice and use were transmitted in any degree from generation to generation, we should expect the caste system to result, after many generations, in so many distinct breeds of men of highly specialised and perfected powers of the kinds used in the pursuit of each of the caste occupations. And this might make for progress. Each man would be employed in the occupation for which he was best suited. But, as we have seen, it is probable that use-inheritance does not occur; and there seems to be no evidence that differentiation and hereditary specialisation of faculties of this sort result from the caste system[147]. In each caste men continue to be born of the most diverse powers suited for the most diverse occupations; and one effect of the caste system is that the best powers of any man will in the great majority of cases be prevented from finding their most effective outlet.

That involves a great waste of faculty, which makes strongly for stagnation. We shall realize the importance of this influence, if we reflect on the great achievements, in the most diverse fields, of men who under our modern system have risen from some humble station and occupation, to which under the caste system they would have been rigidly confined.

Again, within each caste custom rules the lives of the members with much greater force than it can exert in a large and complex society in the absence of the caste system. For each caste has its own tradition and customary code, which is necessarily narrow because of the uniformity of the conditions of life of those who obey it; hence tradition and custom have a narrow and well-defined field of operation; and the narrower the field of its application, the more rigidly will custom control action.