fool. . . . If a house in a Roumanian village burns, they let it quietly burn down, and anyone who happens to be in a burning house must have the courage with God's help to save himself.1

b) A moment's reflection shows us that the practices in this field are matters of race experience rather than race endowment, and that differences in the moral attitudes of the same society at different points in its history are as great as can be found in different races at the same moment. Any department of morals if examined historically will show this. Dueling, for instance, is almost a memory in American society. But between 1601 and 1609, 2,000 men of noble birth fell in duels in France alone, and "there was scarce a Frenchman who had not killed his man in a duel.' As late as 1857 an American magazine contains a long eulogy of dueling from which the following is taken:

112

Who does not prefer the regulated duel to the brutal rencontre of the fist, or the bludgeon, or the bloody Bowie knife? And who that possesses what our Washington claimed for himself, "the sensitiveness of a gentleman," would submit his cause to the farcical mockery of a resort to a law court in such cases? The shot fired by the vindictive Kentuckian, Marshall, in due form at the body of the libelous journalist, Webb, was worth an ass' load of statutes and a library of sermons.3

c) It is also obvious that moral attitudes-the sense of personal dignity, honesty, bravery, chastity-will be different in the different social levels of the same group. The gentleman and the peasant will react differently to an insult. The gentleman is forced to conform to the code which distinguishes his class. I suppose that no racial differences will be found greater than those which distinguished, say, the Polish noble and serf. In the period of bond service in Poland and Russia the ideas of the peasant with regard to dignity, labor, honesty, and veracity very much resembled those of the Negro in slavery.

Among themselves the peasants are not addicted to thieving, as is proved by the fact that they habitually leave their doors unlocked when the inmates of the house are working in the fields; but if the muzhik finds in the proprietor's farmyard a piece of iron or a bit of rope, or any of the little things that he constantly requires and has difficulty in obtaining he is very apt to pick it up

Slavici, J., Die Rumänen, 140–50.

* Cf. Westermarck, E., Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, I, 508. • Russell's Magazine, I, 137, May, 1857.

L

and carry it home. Gathering firewood in the landlord's forest he does not consider as theft, because "God planted the trees and watered them," and in the time of serfage he was allowed to supply himself with firewood in this way.'

A Russian proverb says: "Our Christ himself would steal if his hands were not pierced." Emperor Alexander the First declared: "If my Russians only knew where to hide them, they would steal my battleships; if they could draw my teeth out in my sleep without waking me, they would do it."

[The habit of stealing from the manorial property, which grew up in the period of serfdom] and which gave rise to proverbs-among the nobles: "Every peasant is a thief," and among the peasants, "If you do not steal you will never have anything"-is considered by the peasants as nothing bad or against their ethical sense. The peasant, who for centuries gave his labor to the landlord without sufficient recompense, and therefore fell into poverty, held himself in a certain measure entitled to take from the landlord's territory whatever he needed, if he could. This pertains above all to the older generation, although this attitude is still very strongly developed in the younger as well.3

d) The isolation of a people may result in the absence or weakness of certain moral notions.

Until the eighteenth century the Russian language had not a single word for honor. . . . . Peter the Great himself had to make the conception of military honor clear to his generals.4

The moral enormities reported from certain Slavic communities are similarly the result of isolation, and resemble the toughness developed in our boy gangs.

I have seen a man in the street fall in an accident; the wagon breaks, the horses start up, he himself is injured, and although it happens in the middle of the village, everybody goes along without turning around. Drunken and raving wedding-parties drive their wagons over such an unfortunate and tread him to death. And there are certain heroes in every village who make a business of driving their wagons upon the passers-by and throwing them to the ground.s

e) A sudden elevation to a different status, and the imitation of the standards of the higher class, is accompanied, as in the case of

I Wallace, Russia, 458.

Stern, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Russland, I, 272.

Von Hupka, Entwicklung der westgalizischen Dorfzustände, 71-79.

4 Stern, op. cit., I, 259.

5 Rhamm, K., "Der Verkehr der Geschlechter unter den Slaven in seinen gegensätzlichen Erscheinungen," Globus, LXXXII, 103-8.

the Negro and the peasant, with some moral breakdowns and some poses.

Formerly all peasants, friends or strangers, addressed each other with "ty" or if they were older in years by "wy," and now this habit is falling more and more out of use; more and more often now we hear peasants who are acquaintances but not friends addressing each other with Sir (Pan), as was the custom among the Polish nobility as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This is also without doubt a sign of an increase in the feeling of personal dignity. The same thing is witnessed by the legal complaints, very frequent today but formerly quite unheard of, for insults to honor, in legal practice the so-called Pyskówki. This feeling, which is often falsely shown, has its source often in the overweening conceit and general vanity of the people, especially in dealings with strangers. The old apparent servility of the peasant, still largely existing but in a process of rapid decline, seems in many cases to go directly over into a certain haughtiness which is not infrequently observed, especially in the second generation after the bond-service period.1

The litigiousness of the Galician agricultural population, fostered by a flood of "dark existences," does much for the discredit of the other crown lands, and supplies another cause of their sad material condition. The number of petty cases (up to 100 crowns) amounted in Galicia between the years 1890 and 1901 to an average of 466,815, in rich Bohemia 138,356, in lower Austria with Vienna 128,846.2

f) The renunciation of dignity as a means of life appears among our indigent classes especially when in the presence of promiscuous charity, and may become characteristic of a community. The doctrine that almsgiving was a merit is responsible for the insistent character of beggary in strongly Catholic countries. Chronic poverty and recurrent famine have also contributed to make beggar-villages in Russia.

The great effect on the Russian morals derived from the profession of begging is clear when one discovers that the number of voluntary Russian beggars and beggar women amounts at least to a million. . . . . In Akschenass, a village of 120 houses, when the begging craze began, only four families remained as guardians of the place. In the parish of Golizyn of three hundred householders, two hundred are wandering beggars.3

g) A part of the offense of immorality consists in its publicity, as giving rise to bad example. This is true to a degree everywhere, but sometimes a group formulates this view quite definitely.

Von Hupka, op. cit., 161-62.

2 Caro, Auswanderung und Auswanderungspolitik in Oesterreich, 53-57. 3 Stern, op. cit., I, 331.

The first requirement which the Roumanian makes of every man is that he do not show himself up. According to his opinion, whoever does not let his vices be openly seen is always a man of good standing. . . . . Whoever has merely stolen is not yet a thief, and whoever knows it but has no interest in the matter must keep still about it; indeed even the injured party himself must if possible deal with the thief in private. . . . . The same holds true of chickens, ducks, geese, lambs, and young pigs; if one steals a thing of that sort merely to make oneself a good dish, and is not caught, he finally brags about it after a few months. But if he is caught the thing he has stolen is hung about his neck, and they lead him along the street, drum the people together at every cross-road and proclaim his transgression, that everyone may guard against him in the future. If the injured party is a "foreigner," the thief who is led about in this way usually does not lose his good reputation.1

h) Moral ideas spread like fashions and are surrounded with "pathos. "Pathos is the glamor of sentiment which grows up around the pet notion of an age and protects it from criticism.” The home, the school, the law and the gospel, and the printed page set the copies. Epithets, phrases, ridicule, caricature are important parts of the apparatus of suggestion. "Scab," "mugwump," "mollycoddle," "the dignity of labor," "a living wage, ""the full dinner pail," "industrial slavery," "white slavery," "liberty of speech," "American," "the People," "Wall Street," are some popular American phrases. It is important to determine what are the dominant moral tendencies in races and groups and what is the peculiar apparatus of suggestion.4

§ 20. Materials and methods of work.-Materials for the interpretation of the mental life of a race may be assembled on three principles from personal observation, from undesigned, and from designed records.

♦ With some modifications the foregoing sectional headings may be used as a basis for the classification of materials. I think the following will be found adequate: o, Bibliography; 1, Physical characters (including birth-rate, race-crossing, maladies, insanity); 2, Mental faculties (acuity of sense, memory, abstraction, inhibition, curiosity, logic, discussion, temperament, proverbs, imagination, folk-lore, humor); 3, Attention; 4, Habit; 5, Crisis (pace); 6, Imitation (great men, invention); 7, Isolation; 8, Race-prejudice; 9, Economic conditions; 10, Classes (manipulation); II, Occupations; 12, State of knowledge; 13, Family, community, and gang; 14, Organization (clubs, societies); 15, Art and play; 16, Magic and religion; 17, Position of woman (sex mores); 18, Moral ideas as enumerated, § 21:56.

In the first case it is desirable to live among the group, preferably in a family, and gradually get the context of the group life. The most common error is to accept particular cases as general. Be suspicious of striking cases; they may be as surprising to the people among whom they occur as they are to you. If you find they are rare record them so. Misunderstandings also arise as in all intercourse through incomplete communication (cf. § 3d) and through failure to understand particular conditions behind an incident. After leaving a most surly, suspicious, and uncommunicative Slovak village, I learned that one of its members was in hiding on account of a recent murder, and any intrusion was at the time unwelcome (cf. § 3d). Interviews may be regarded as a part of personal observation, but the ordinary inhabitant has a singular interest in misleading the outsider and putting a different face on things. Interviews in the main may be treated as a body of error to be used for purposes of comparison in future observation. But, among others, playground directors, settlement, charity, immigration-league, and Y.M.C.A. workers, judges, and superintendents of institutions, probation officers, editors, teachers, ministers, and physicians are in a position to give reliable data, and are often interested in doing so.

History, ethnology, and folk-lore are records by design, often not focused from our standpoint, but nevertheless the formal records.

Among undesigned records are letters, diaries, newspapers, court, church, and club records, sermons, addresses, school curricula,

'I do not go into the question of bibliography here. Some good books on Europe are referred to above, e.g., Meyer (§ 14ƒ), von Hupka (§ 4c), Bernhard (§ 10b), Krauss (§ 14c), Simkhowitsch (§ 14c). Good books on the Negro in America are: Fleming, W. L., Documentary History of Reconstruction; Phillips, U. B., Plantation and Frontier; Stone, A. H., Studies in the American Race Problem; DuBois (above, § 6h). On the Negro in West Africa: Bennett, R. E., At the Back of the Black Man's Mind; Ellis, A. B., (1) The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa, (2) The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, (3) The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa; Johnston, H. H., Liberia; Overbergh, C. van, Collection de monographies ethnographiques (8 vols. to date). My Source Book (above § 3i) contains a bibliography on Africa, and the Library of Congress publishes A Select List of References on the Negro Question (in America) and A List of Books on the Immigrant, both by A. P. C. Griffin. Balch, Emily G., Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, has a bibliography of the Slav in Europe and America, 483-512.