are apt to think of
the savage as a freakish creature, all moods--at one moment a friend,
at the next moment a fiend. So he might be, if it were not for the
social drill imposed by his customs. So he is, if you destroy his
customs, and expect him nevertheless to behave as an educated and
reasonable being. Given, then, a primitive society in a healthy and
uncontaminated condition, its members will invariably be found to be
on the average more law-abiding, as judged from the standpoint of their
own law, than is the case any civilized state.

But now we come to the bad side of custom. Its conserving influence
extends to all traditional practices, however unreasonable or
perverted. In that amber any fly is apt to be enclosed. Hence the
whimsicalities of savage custom. In _Primitive Culture_ Dr. Tylor
tells a good story about the Dyaks of Borneo. The white man's way of
chopping down a tree by notching out V-shaped cuts was not according
to Dyak custom. Hence, any Dyak caught imitating the European fashion
was punished by a fine. And yet so well aware were they that this method
was an improvement on their own that, when they could trust each other
not to tell, they would surreptitiously use it. These same Dyaks, it
may be added, are, according to Mr. A.R. Wallace, the best of observers,
"among the most pleasing of savages." They are good-natured, mild,
and by no means bloodthirsty in the ordinary relations of life. Yet
they are well known to be addicted to the horrid practice of
head-hunting. "It was a custom," Mr. Wallace explains, "and as a custom
was observed, but it did not imply any extraordinary barbarism or moral
delinquency."

The drawback, then, to a reign of pure custom is this: Meaningless
injunctions abound, since the value of a traditional practice does
not depend on its consequences, but simply on the fact that it is the
practice; and this element of irrationality is enough to perplex, till
it utterly confounds, the mind capable of rising above routine and
reflecting on the true aims and ends of the social life. How to break
through "the cake of custom," as Bagehot has called it, is the hardest
lesson that humanity has ever had to learn. Customs have often been
broken up by the clashing of different societies; but in that case
they merely crystallize again into new shapes. But to break through
custom by the sheer force of reflection, and so to make rational
progress possible, was the intellectual feat of one p