impulse
in the psychologically disintegrating effects of the Civil War.
Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought,
whereby clannishness in some measure replaces the sense of solidarity,
and a sense of invidious distinction supplants the impulse to equitable,
everyday serviceability. As an outcome of the cumulative action of these
factors, the generation which follows a season of war is apt to witness
a rehabilitation of the element of status, both in its social life and
in its scheme of devout observances and other symbolic or ceremonial
forms. Throughout the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the
seventies also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more direct
and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian temperament, such
as the recrudescence of outlawry and the spectacular quasi-predatory
careers of fraud run by certain "captains of industry", came to a
head earlier and were appreciably on the decline by the close of the
seventies. The recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to
have passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still remoter
and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic sense; and
these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more slowly and reached
their most effective development at a still later date. There is reason
to believe that the culmination is now already past. Except for the new
impetus given by a new war experience, and except for the support which
the growth of a wealthy class affords to all ritual, and especially to
whatever ceremonial is wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of
status, it is probable that the late improvements and augmentation of
scholastic insignia and ceremonial would gradually decline. But while it
may be true that the cap and gown, and the more strenuous observance
of scholastic proprieties which came with them, were floated in on this
post-bellum tidal wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt
true that such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in
the college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the
hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the requisite
pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the colleges of the
c