CHAPTER XV

THE MORES CAN MAKE ANYTHING RIGHT AND PREVENT
CONDEMNATION OF ANYTHING

The mores define the limits which make right and wrong.--Public
punishments.--Prisons in England in the eighteenth century.--
Wars of factions; penalties of defeat.--Bundling.--Two forms of
bundling.--Mediaeval bundling.--Poverty and wooing.--Night
wooing in the North American colonies.--Reasons for it.--Public
lupanars.--The end of the lupanars.--Education needed to
clarify the judgment.

+572. Mores define the limits which make anything right.+ At every turn
we find new evidence that the mores can make anything right. What they
do is that they cover a usage in dress, language, behavior, manners,
etc., with the mantle of current custom, and give it regulation and
limits within which it becomes unquestionable. The limit is generally a
limit of toleration. Literature, pictures, exhibitions, celebrations,
and festivals are controlled by some undefined, and probably
undefinable, standard of decency and propriety, which sets a limit of
toleration on the appeals to fun, sensuality, and various prejudices. In
regard to all social customs, the mores sanction them by defining them
and giving them form. Such regulated customs are etiquette. The
regulation by the mores always gives order and form, and thus surrounds
life with limits within which we may and beyond which we may not pursue
our interests (e.g. property and marriage). Horseplay and practical
jokes have been tolerated, at various times and places, at weddings.
They require good-natured toleration, but soon run to excess and may
become unendurable. The mores set the limits or define the disapproval.
The wedding journey was invented to escape the "jokes." The rice and
old shoes will soon be tabooed. The mores fluctuate in their
prescriptions. If the limits are too narrow, there is an overflow into
vice and abuse, as was proved by seventeenth-century puritanism in
England. If the limit is too remote, there is no discipline, and the
regulation fails of its purpose. Then a corruption of manners ensues. In
the cases now to be given we shall see the power of the mores to give
validity to various customs. The cases are all such that we may see in
them sanction and currency given to things which seem to us contrary to
simple and self-evident rules of right; that is, they are contrary to
the views now inculcated in us by our own mores