The force enters into the mores and becomes a component in
them. Despotism is in the mores of negro tribes, and of all Mohammedan
peoples. There is an element of force in all forms of property,
marriage, and religion. Slavery, however, is the grandest case of force
in the mores, employed to make some serve the interests of others, in
the societal organization. The historical classes, having selected the
group purposes and decided the group policy, use the force of the
society itself to coerce all to acquiesce and to work and fight in the
determined way without regard to their individual interests. This they
do by means of discipline and ritual. In different kinds of mores the
force is screened by different devices. It is always present, and
brutal, cruel force has entered largely into the development of all our
mores, even those which we think most noble and excellent.

+72. Might and right.+ Modern civilized states of the best form are
often called jural states because the concept of rights enters so
largely into all their constitutions and regulations. Our political
philosophy centers around that concept, and all our social discussions
fall into the form of propositions and disputes about rights. The
history of the dogma of rights has been such that rights have been
believed to be self-evident and self-existent, and as having prevailed
especially in primitive society. Rights are also regarded as the
opposite of force. These notions only prove the antagonism between our
mores and those of earlier generations. In fact, it is a characteristic
of our mores that the form of our thinking about all points of political
philosophy is set for us by the concept of rights. Nothing but might has
ever made right, and if we include in might (as we ought to) elections
and the decisions of courts, nothing but might makes right now. We must
distinguish between the anterior and the posterior view of the matter in
question. If we are about to take some action, and are debating the
right of it, the might which can be brought to support one view of it
has nothing to do with the right of it. If a thing has been done and is
established by force (that is, no force can reverse it), it is right in
the only sense we know, and rights will follow from it which are not
vitiated at all by the force in it. There would be no security at all
for rights if this were not so. We find men and parties protesting,
declaiming, complaining of what is done, and