ite, in
the United States, are now tending to more strict segregation. The
remnants of our Indians partly retain Indian mores, partly adopt white
mores. They languish in moral isolation and homelessness. They have no
adjustment to any social environment. Gypsies have never adopted the
mores of civilized life. They are morally and physically afloat in the
world. There are in India and in the Russian empire great numbers of
remnants of aboriginal tribes, and there are, all over the world, groups
of pariahs, or _races maudites_, which the great groups will not
assimilate. The Jews, although more numerous, and economically far
stronger, are in the same attitude to the peoples amongst which they
live.

+117. Modification of the mores by agitation.+ To this point all
projects of missions and reform must come. It must be recognized that
what is proposed is an arbitrary action on the mores. Therefore nothing
sudden or big is possible. The enterprise is possible only if the mores
are ready for it. The conditions of success lie in the mores. The
methods must conform to the mores. That is why the agitator, reformer,
prophet, reorganizer of society, who has found out "the truth" and wants
to "get a law passed" to realize it right away, is only a
mischief-maker. He has won considerable prestige in the last hundred
years, but if the cases are examined it will be found that when he had
success it was because he took up something for which the mores were
ready. Wilberforce did not overthrow slavery. Natural forces reduced to
the service of man and the discovery of new land set men "free" from
great labor, and new ways suggested new sentiments of humanity and
ethics. The mores changed and all the wider deductions in them were
repugnant to slavery. The free-trade agitators did not abolish the corn
laws. The interests of the English population had undergone a new
distribution. It was the redistribution of population and political
power in the United States which made the civil war. Witchcraft and
trial by torture were not abolished by argument. Critical knowledge and
thirst for reality made them absurd. In Queen Anne's reign prisons in
England were frightful sinks of vice, misery, disease, and cruel
extortion. "So the prisons continued until the time of Howard,"[161]
seventy-five years later. The mores had then become humanitarian. Howard
was able to get a response.

+118. Capricious interest of the masses.+ Whether the masses will thin