sed to the taking of life, for we glory in the taking of life under
the patriotic name of "war," and are fairly indifferent to it when
involved by the demands of our industrial system; but the killing of the
aged no longer subserves any social need and their preservation ministers
to our civilized emotional needs. The killing of a man is indeed
notoriously an act which differs widely in its moral value at different
periods and in different countries. It was quite moral in England two
centuries ago and less, to kill a man for trifling offences against
property, for such punishment commended itself as desirable to the general
sense of the educated community. To-day it would be regarded as highly
immoral. We are even yet only beginning to doubt the morality of
condemning to death and imprisoning for life an unmarried girl who
destroyed her infant at birth, solely actuated, against all her natural
impulses, by the primitive instinct of self-defense. It cannot be said
that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though
we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants
generally. Every age or land has its own morality.

"Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck,
"involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to
distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom."[260]
Custom is not only the basis of morality but also of law. "Custom is
law."[261] The field of theoretical morality has been found so fascinating
a playground for clever philosophers that there has sometimes been a
danger of forgetting that, after all, it is not theoretical morality but
practical morality, the question of what men in the mass of a community
actually do, which constitutes the real stuff of morals.[262] If we define
more precisely what we mean by morals, on the practical side, we may say
that it is constituted by those customs which the great majority of the
members of a community regard as conducive to the welfare of the community
at some particular time and place. It is for this reason--i.e., because it
is a question of what is and not of merely what some think ought to
be--that practical morals form the proper subject of science. "If the word
'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science," Westermarck says, "the
object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a
fact."[263]

Lecky's _History of European Morals_ is a