antially a change in men's
views as to what is good and right, and the means through which a change
is wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in large
part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.

Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human life
make its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this true of any
change in the direction of what is called progress; that is to say, in
the direction of divergence from the archaic position--from the position
which may be accounted the point of departure at any step in the social
evolution of the community. Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to
which the race has been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is
especially true in case the development away from this past standpoint
has not been due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose
temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint. The cultural stage which
lies immediately back of the present in the life history of Western
civilization is what has here been called the quasi-peaceable stage. At
this quasi-peaceable stage the law of status is the dominant feature in
the scheme of life. There is no need of pointing out how prone the
men of today are to revert to the spiritual attitude of mastery and of
personal subservience which characterizes that stage. It may rather be
said to be held in an uncertain abeyance by the economic exigencies of
today, than to have been definitely supplanted by a habit of mind that
is in full accord with these later-developed exigencies. The predatory
and quasi-peaceable stages of economic evolution seem to have been of
long duration in life history of all the chief ethnic elements which go
to make up the populations of the Western culture. The temperament
and the propensities proper to those cultural stages have, therefore,
attained such a persistence as to make a speedy reversion to the broad
features of the corresponding psychological constitution inevitable in
the case of any class or community which is removed from the action of
those forces that make for a maintenance of the later-developed habits
of thought.

It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or even
considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher industrial
culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment, or to an economic
situation of a more primitive character, they quickly show evidence of
reversion toward the spiritual features which chara