above (sec. 100), is the
case in which the individual voluntarily sets himself in antagonism to
the mores of the society. There are cases in which the individual finds
himself in involuntary antagonism to the mores of the society, or of
some subgroup to which he belongs. If a man passes from one class to
another, his acts show the contrast between the mores in which he was
bred and those in which he finds himself. The satirists have made fun of
the _parvenu_ for centuries. His mistakes and misfortunes reveal the
nature of the mores, their power over the individual, their pertinacity
against later influences, the confusion in character produced by
changing them, and the grip of habit which appears both in the
persistence of old mores and the weakness of new ones. Every emigrant is
forced to change his mores. He loses the sustaining help of use and
wont. He has to acquire a new outfit of it. The traveler also
experiences the change from life in one set of mores to life in another.
The experience gives him the best power to criticise his native mores
from a standpoint outside of them. In the North American colonies white
children were often stolen by Indians and brought up by them in their
ways. Whether they would later, if opportunity offered, return to white
society and white mores, or would prefer to remain with the Indians,
seems to have depended on the age at which they were captured.
Missionaries have often taken men of low civilization out of the society
in which they were born, have educated them, and taught them white men's
mores. If a single clear and indisputable case could be adduced in which
such a person was restored to his own people and did not revert to their
mode of life, it would be a very important contribution to ethnology. We
are forced to believe that, if a baby born in New England was taken to
China and given to a Chinese family to rear and educate, he would become
a Chinaman in all which belongs to the mores, that is to say, in his
character, conduct, and code of life.

+113. Antagonism of earlier and later mores.+ When, in the course of
time, changes occur in the mores, the men of a later generation find
themselves in antagonism to the mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric
poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the
mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth
century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment
of Melanth