The disposition to domineer over your fellow-man-to make him obey you or assent to your opinions, whether he will or no-is only an evanescent phase of the disposition to kill him if he interferes in any way with the accomplishment of your purposes in life. The very same diminution in the sphere of military activity, attendant upon the aggregation of men into great and complex political societies, which we found to explain the decreasing atrocity of persecution, explains also the decreasing vitality of its moral foundation in the disposition to domineer over one's fellow-men.

The weakening of the assumption of infallibility in one's own opinions is manifestly a consequence of the same set of coöperating causes. When one's life is extremely simple and monotonous, consisting of very few experiences that are perpetually repeated; when one is not often compelled to test the validity of one's own conclusions by comparing them with the different conclusions which other people draw from the same data; when one lives amid a certain group of beliefs, customs, and observances that are never brought into comparison (save, perhaps, in exterminating warfare) with other differing groups;-under such conditions as these it is noticeable that one's opinions are formed with great promptness, and when once formed are unchangeable. These are the conditions under which the opinions of savages are formed, and the chief characteristic in the opinions of savages is their wonderful rigidity; you can no more change them than you could teach a fox, when chased by the hunter, to climb a tree like a cat. Or, consider the case of an ignorant woman, in the lower classes of civilized society. Her opinions about men and things are formed in an instant, by some mental process of which she can render no account, and when once formed are utterly impervious to fact or to argument. She acts on the tacit assumption that she is infallible, precisely as the savage acts. To think of hesitating for a moment and questioning the validity of their opinions, is something which never happens to either of them.

This is the obstinate fashion in which men used to cling to their opinions in that crude state of social development in which each little society was at war with every other, and in which, accordingly, it was impossible to bring a given set of opinions into free contact with another set, within the limits of one and the same society. As men have gradually been brought together into great and complex societies, as their opinions have been

brought more and more into the focus of a common point of comparison, this rigidity of the mental processes-so like the rigidity of the mental processes of the lower animals-has gradually yielded to circumstances such as favor flexibility. With the case of the savage or the woman who comes to scrub the floor, contrast the case of the scientific philosopher, whose opinions are slowly formed after a long and careful weighing of conflicting evidences, and when once formed are held subject to perpetual revision and modification. On considering these two contrasted cases, it becomes obvious how the aggregation of men into great and complex societies, bringing with it increased variety of experience and increased knowledge of the manifold liability to error, has operated to destroy the confident assumption of infallibility which characterizes the bigot and the savage.

We have now made out, I think, a very fair explanation of the way in which the persecuting spirit has been affected by the general progress of human society. But one of the deepest considerations of all still remains to be treated.

In the early stages of society, as illustrated by such writers as Sir Henry Maine, the unit of society is not the individual, but the family or clan. In a tribe of primitive savages there is no such thing as individual rights or individual obligations. It is the tribe as a whole that incurs obligations and asserts its rights as far as it is concerned with adjacent tribes. Amid the pressing interests of the tribe, in the fierce struggle for existence, the individual has no chance whatever for especial consideration. The traces of this state of things confront us continually as we study ancient history, where no fact is more conspicuous than the utterly ruthless way in which the individual is sacrificed to the state. The bearing of this state of things upon the history of persecution goes farther than anything else toward explaining that dreadful history. In the early stages of society, when only small political aggregates have been formed, and when each little aggregate is perpetually struggling for its life with adjacent aggregates, the only kind of responsibility known to the tribe is corporate responsibility. The tribe, as a whole, is held to be responsible corporately for the acts of each of its members, and hence it is necessary that the acts and beliefs of every one of the members should be subject to the approval of the tribe. If any one individual does something that is displeasing to the gods, the whole tribe is liable to be punished for the misdeed of this one

person. This feeling was universal in ancient society, and, until we realize how intense it was, we shall be unable to understand some of the most remarkable scenes of ancient history. Take, for example, the frantic excitement which was stirred up in Athens, just before the expedition against Syracuse, by the mutilation of the rude way-side statues of Hermes. It is impossible for a modern man to understand this furious excitement unless he duly considers the fact that, in the minds of the Athenians, the whole community-and not merely the individual criminals concerned was responsible to the gods for this outrage. The whole community might be visited by the angry gods with famine and plague because of the misdeeds of a few graceless members of the community.

This intense feeling of corporate responsibility pervades all the life of ancient society, and by keeping it in mind we shall understand many occurrences in ancient history which without this key we should find incomprehensible. When we bethink ourselves how far such deeply rooted feelings propagate themselves in history, we shall be inclined, I think, to find in this sense of corporate responsibility the weightiest cause of those deeds of persecution which have made history hideous. To remove the heretic, lest God curse us all for his sake,-this no doubt has been the feeling that, more than any other, has justified the use of racks and thumb-screws.

But with the progress of society toward wider and wider political aggregation, and toward greater and greater political stability, -along with the growing complexity of industrial processes, and along with the partial elimination of warfare,-there has slowly grown up a feeling that it is the individual, and not the tribe or the society, that is ultimately responsible for the individual's opinions on matters of religion. Whatever we may think to-day about the results or the method of Colonel Ingersoll, we certainly do not entertain the dread that because of Colonel Ingersoll's opinions, or because of his bold manner of expressing them, we are in danger of a famine, a plague, or a civil war next year. The aggregation of small communities into great nations, and the growing complexity of the industrial processes by which great nations are sustained, have entirely obliterated in our minds the recollection of the kinds of belief and the kinds of moral obligation which characterized the primitive tribal communities. The phase of feeling characteristic of the primitive community showed

itself all through the Middle Ages, and was mainly responsible for the atrocities which have made the memory of the Middle Ages hideous. The beginnings of modern history, as distinguished from this mere perpetuation of primeval ideas, were signalized by the revolt of Luther against the doctrine of corporate responsibility for opinion, and against the assumption of infallibility on the part of a given body of men.

JOHN FISKE.

VOL. CXXXII.-No. 290.

2

CONTROLLING FORCES IN AMERICAN POLITICS.

"Our virtues live in the interpretation of the times."

PARTY names are found the most inapt or deceptive of terms. Sometimes they have in themselves no political meaning, and come into being from the most insignificant of circumstances, or from mere local similitudes. Tory, the name for now 200 years of the great and so-called Conservative party of Great Britain, was borrowed, and applied as an invective, from the name of a set of ruffians in the disturbed districts of Ireland; while Whig, for an equal length of time the name of that party in England which professed to defend the rights of the people against the aggressions of the Crown, was appropriated, and applied, also, as an epithet of discredit, from the name of a certain Scotch cheesecurd, or that of Scotch cattle-drivers. Sometimes-as the names in our own politics of Federalist, Republican, and Democratthey, in themselves, import more or less clear and broad ideas of principles and policies, but they may be and have been borne by associations of men whose opinions and designs were the reverse of those indicated by the party name. The Democracy of Athens was as intolerant of opposition and of equal rights as any tyrant could be, and the Republic of Rome bore but the faintest resemblance to the republics of the present time. For more than thirty years of its existence, the present Democratic party was persistently devoted to the preservation and propagation of the institution of slavery, and the largest part of its effective strength finally plunged into a rebellion for the same end. Intelligent people, therefore, will place little or no reliance upon the name of a party as indicating what it believes in or what it intends to do.

A successful party is not likely immediately to break up its organization; a defeated one may or may not, according to the