CHAP. XXVIII Definite in the So- The Inferior Are the Mudsills of Society perior should determine their financial relations; the superior would do what was right and the inferior should accept what the superior might give without a question or a murmur. Among the samurai, where the arrangement is between equals, bargaining or making fixed or fast terms which will hold to the end, and which may be carried to the courts in case of differences, was a thing practically unknown in the older civilization. Everything of a business nature was left to honor and was carried on in a mutual confidence.12 4. Fines and indemnities are graded according to social status. The Babylonian code of Hammurabi fixed damages with reference to the social class of the injured man. With the rise of class distinctions in early Europe the rates of compensation came to be different among persons of different classes. The wergeld or social value of a man constituted the basis for fines and indemnities, and every man had a wergeld fixed by law. Thus in the code of the Alamans the life of a freeman is valued at 160 sous, freedman, 80, slave, 40. The Visigoths fix for the life of a freeman a compensation twice that for the life of a freedman. The Frisians make a long tariff of indemnities for every sort of blow, then add: "these figures are for freemen. For nobles multiply by three, for serfs take half." According to another Germanic code, the fine for a blow that breaks a tooth is for a noble 15 solidi, for a freeman 5, for a slave 2. 5. The inferior comes to be regarded, not simply as of less worth, but as existing for the sake of the superior. In a Vedic metaphor describing “the altar of the King's state," the priests and the nobles are the bricks, while the common people are "the filling between the bricks." In the political thought of the slaveholding South the planter and merchant class were the people for whose benefit society existed the "Spartans "— while the slaves and manual laborers were to the social edifice what mudsills are to a house. In the Orient woman has worth, not in her own right, but as a means to an end, that end being the gratification and comfort of the male. Her lot is summed up in "the three obediences," viz., to father, then to husband, lastly to son. "A woman," says a Japanese manual on ethics," should never weary of yielding to her husband, must form no friendships or intimacy save as sanctioned by him, must obey her husband with fear and trembling." 12" Social Evolution of the Japanese,” p. 120. CHAP. XXVIII Uncon sumption That Woman Fulfills Her ing to the Where the spirit of the Old South survives in its purity, an elaborate lady" worship fails to conceal the universal unconscious assumption that God placed women here for the sake of the scious Asmen. The male sex has obviously shaped the ideals girls are taught to realize, but the female sex has had little share in shaping the ideals boys are taught to realize. It is a matter of course that women should find their mission in serving, pleasing, and inspiring men, but no one suggests that the male sex has its end in anything it does for women. Its end is within itself. The young woman must cultivate a conciliating and caressing manner, and avoid opposing or disagreeing with men. If she has opinions she dissembles them, and if she has learning she hides it lest male irritation blast her with the reproach "unwomanly." To please men she must wear delicate and flimsy clothes, no matter what they cost her fingers or her purse, and shun the plain but convenient "tailor-made" garments. Male opinion frowns on the widow who remarries as putting her own happiness above loyalty to a man's memory; but no one thinks less of the widower who remarries. The divorced man goes everywhere, but the divorced woman is ostracized no matter what her justification. The men hold under constant surveillance the reading, acquaintance, and activities of their womenfolk, and expect the woman to subordinate her own notion of what is proper for her to the judgment of her nearest male relative. The assumption is that woman's repute and standing are of more consequence to her menfolk than to herself. Again, the conception of the inferior as mere means to the life of the superior may apply to the significance of common people for the gifted. This view is voiced by Renan in the words: "The bulk of humanity lives by proxy-millions live and die in order to produce a rare élite, the masses do not count, they are a mere bulk of raw material, out of which, drop by drop, the essence is extracted." СНАР. Those Who Have Gotten Up Kick Down the Ladder by Which Ancestors IN CHAPTER XXIX SEGREGATION AND SUBORDINATION N case the sense of worth difference sharpens to such a point that the social superior shuns fellowship and intermarriage with the inferior, society comes to be made up of closed hereditary classes. Thus among the Saxons of the eighth century social divisions were cast-iron, and the law punished with death the man who should presume to marry a woman of rank higher than his own. The Lombards killed the serf who ventured to marry a free woman, while the Visigoths and Burgundians scourged and burned them both. Among the early Germans a freedman remained under the taint of ancestral servitude until the third generation, i.e., until he could show four free-born ancestors. As class lines harden, the upper class becomes more jealous of its status and resists or retards the admission of commoners, however great their merit or wealth. In the later Roman Empire the law did not absolutely prohibit a curial from rising to another grade in society, but it made his progress so slow and difficult that escape by legal means was possible to very few. Even when a man had surmounted all barriers and become an imperial functionary or a senator, his children born before his elevation were retained in their original rank and his property remained liable for the municipal charges of his class. If a man attempted to hasten his rise or his deliverance by overleaping some of the stages of duty he was sent back to the original starting point.1 In this way birth or purity of blood becomes more decisive for social status than the differences of occupation or wealth which raised up the original social inequalities. Worth distinctions which in their early form may stimulate the ambitious to do their best become paralyzing as they stiffen into caste, because they grant no recognition to individual achievement. The social distance between castes may become too great for 1 Dill, "Roman Society," p. 214. the bond of common nationality to overcome. The nobles of the Middle Ages lived in their caste rather than in their people and felt themselves closer to the nobles of another nation than to the commons of their own. Something of this spirit has lived on in Poland. Says Palmer: One might almost say that the Poles consist of two separate races, so entirely distinct are the nobility from the great mass of the nation. To this complete separation between nobles and peasants nearly all the troubles of Poland have been due in the past. The Polish aristocracy is, in fact, a caste entirely apart from the people. This, it is true, is also the case among the aristocracies of nearly all continental countries, but in hardly any other nationality is the gulf so wide as almost to exclude the possibility of mutual feelings of respect. The Austro-German nobles, though no less a caste, are as a rule decidedly proud of the Germanic peasantry, and regard them as infinitely superior to those of other races. The Magyar nobles have, perhaps, an even higher opinion of the peasantry of their own nationality. The Polish peasant, on the contrary, is not regarded with greater contempt by the Austrians, Prussians, or Russians than he is, with rare exceptions, by nobles of his own race.8 CHAP. XXIX In a Caste The attitude of aloofness shows itself first in the highest class, but presently the intermediate classes become infected with snobbery, and each grade shrinks from all below it. In England the wholesale tradesman looks down upon the retail tradesman, the Indispen on Someone Is an sable Spiritual 2 Very cleverly Beaconsfield insisted upon the representative character Solace of the English peers. In his great defense of Toryism spoken at Manchester, April 3, 1872, he says: "Suppose - which God forbid - there was no House of Commons, and any Englishman — I will take him from either end of the island. a Cumberland or a Cornish man, finds himself aggrieved, the Cumbrian says: This conduct I experience is most unjust. I know a Cumberland man in the House of Lords, the Earl of Carlisle or the Earl of Lonsdale; I will go to him; he will never see a Cumberland man ill treated. The Cornish man will say: I will go to the Earl of Port Eliot; his family have sacrificed themselves before this for the liberties of Englishmen, and he will get justice done me. . . ." A privileged order may indeed start with strong local attachments which make them good spokesmen for local interests. But presently they become class conscious and feel with members of their order rather than with people of their county. When its privileges are attacked, the members of the titled order become intensely class conscious and their every move is dictated by class interest rather than the interest of their locality or their country. A privileged order assailed soon becomes narrow and selfish enough to deserve its finish. a" Austro-Hungarian Life in Town and Country,” pp. 77-78. СНАР. The Presence of Inferiors, unless They Are in Bender- Sympathy Becomes latter looks down upon his clerk, the clerk looks down upon the woman who lets him lodgings, and she in turns looks down on the man who cobbles her shoes. In reverse, the man who works with his hands looks up to the petty shopkeeper and he looks up to the big tradesman. This one looks up to the banker or manufacturer, who looks up to the landed gentry, who look up to the peers, while at the apex of the whole organization stands the throne. Each class avoids its supposed inferiors as if their presence tainted the air. In India low-caste people are excluded from the temples. In England there is a rule that the railway porter shall not put any one into an apartment occupied by one of the nobility. Moreover, a holder of a first-class or a second-class ticket is entitled to a refund in case a passenger with a ticket of a lower class (his own compartment being full) is put in his compartment. The theory is that the ticket holder has paid for exclusiveness as well as for accommodation. An American university crew about to row in an English regatta was challenged on the ground that according to the regulations the contesting crews must be "gentlemen," while in fact some of the American oarsmen were working their way through college! In a quiet way the lowly born, save the winners of scholarships, are effectually excluded from the great endowed schools like Eton, Harrow, and Rugby, and from the two old universities. Among ourselves the great focal points of caste spirit are army and navy. A junior officer seen talking in a human way to an enlisted man or putting a hand on his shoulder is reprimanded. The lieutenant marrying the daughter of a sergeant is boycotted and driven from the army. An officer has been known to raise a disturbance in a theater on finding his seat next to that of a sergeant, and an admiral has recorded objection on class grounds to the commissioning of the gallant chief of a battleship gun squad. As society becomes aristocratic, humane feeling becomes classbound. Thus an English newspaper gave thanks that while six hundred persons lost their lives in a Chicago theater fire, none of them was of any distinction. On the other hand, tenderness for the highborn makes even-handed justice impossible. It was easy to find law for imprisoning Stead, the fearless London journalist who in his "Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon " exposed the villanies of men in high social position, but none was found for |