ore effectually repressed than ever
before. They produce no controversy. Democracy is in our American mores.
It is a product of our physical and economic conditions. It is
impossible to discuss or criticise it. It is glorified for popularity,
and is a subject of dithyrambic rhetoric. No one treats it with complete
candor and sincerity. No one dares to analyze it as he would aristocracy
or autocracy. He would get no hearing and would only incur abuse. The
thing to be noticed in all these cases is that the masses oppose a deaf
ear to every argument against the mores. It is only in so far as things
have been transferred from the mores into laws and positive institutions
that there is discussion about them or rationalizing upon them. The
mores contain the norm by which, if we should discuss the mores, we
should have to judge the mores. We learn the mores as unconsciously as
we learn to walk and eat and breathe. The masses never learn how we
walk, and eat, and breathe, and they never know any reason why the mores
are what they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to
consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the
bonds of tradition, custom, and habit. The mores contain embodied in
them notions, doctrines, and maxims, but they are facts. They are in the
present tense. They have nothing to do with what ought to be, will be,
may be, or once was, if it is not now.

+81. Blacks and whites in southern society.+ In our southern states,
before the civil war, whites and blacks had formed habits of action and
feeling towards each other. They lived in peace and concord, and each
one grew up in the ways which were traditional and customary. The civil
war abolished legal rights and left the two races to learn how to live
together under other relations than before. The whites have never been
converted from the old mores. Those who still survive look back with
regret and affection to the old social usages and customary sentiments
and feelings. The two races have not yet made new mores. Vain attempts
have been made to control the new order by legislation. The only result
is the proof that legislation cannot make mores. We see also that mores
do not form under social convulsion and discord. It is only just now
that the new society seems to be taking shape. There is a trend in the
mores now as they begin to form under the new state of things. It is not
at all what the humanitarians hoped and expected. The t