come by these accessory features legitimately, by the right of lineal
devolution.

The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther. Ritualistic
survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor and with the freest
air of spontaneity among those seminaries of learning which have to
do primarily with the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
Accordingly it should appear, and it does pretty plainly appear, on
a survey of recent developments in college and university life, that
wherever schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the
immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the
higher learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with
the transition of the schools in question from the field of homely
practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The initial purpose of
these schools, and the work with which they have chiefly had to do at
the earlier of these two stages of their evolution, has been that of
fitting the young of the industrious classes for work. On the higher,
classical plane of learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant
aim becomes the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
classes--or of an incipient leisure class--for the consumption of
goods, material and immaterial, according to a conventionally accepted,
reputable scope and method. This happy issue has commonly been the fate
of schools founded by "friends of the people" for the aid of struggling
young men, and where this transition is made in good form there is
commonly, if not invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic
life in the schools.

In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at
home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities".
This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than anywhere else, in
the life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent
growth. There may be many exceptions from the rule, especially among
those schools which have been founded by the typically reputable and
ritualistic churches, and which, therefore, started on the conservative
and classical plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut;
but the general rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer
American communities during the present century has been that so long
as the constituency from which the colleges have dra