cial institutions and habits may themselves come to be
sanctioned and encouraged. Already we are beginning to
endow the scientific study of government and industrial
relations, and regarding with favor genuine inquiry into the
possibilities of progress.

[Footnote 1: Even in art most people's approvals and disapprovals
are fixed by what is called "good taste," which consists not
infrequently in approving what other people approve. AEsthetic
approval thus becomes approval of the customarily recognized.
It took a Ruskin to make the neglected genius of Turner
fashionable. Keats and Byron were bitterly attacked by the
orthodox critics of their generation.]

IMPORTANCE OF RELATING PRAISE AND BLAME TO SOCIALLY IMPORTANT
CONDUCT. What people approve and disapprove, if their
approval becomes sufficiently emphatic, is fixed by law. Law
is the official and permanent preservation and enforcement
of public approval and condemnation. When certain acts are
regarded as of crucial importance, the group does not depend
on the precarious effectiveness of public opinion, but deliberately
attaches punishments to the performance of undesired
acts, and, more infrequently, rewards to the practices of others.
Most of our laws are enforcement of social condemnations,
for the performance or the non-performance of specific acts,
rather than direct encouragements of action. But which laws
will be passed depends in the first place on social approval or
public opinion. And if, as happens in our complicated political
machinery, laws are passed which have not the sanction
of widespread public approval, they remain "dead letters."

Outside the field of legal control, individual action is controlled
primarily by public opinion. There are many practices,
strictly speaking "within the law," that an increasingly
enlightened public opinion will not sanction; there are many
practices encouraged by an enlightened public which no law
compels. There is no law forcing business establishments to
close every Saturday during the summer, yet many now do.
There are many courtesies practiced by them which are not
ordained by law. That adverse public opinion may have
economic consequences if disregarded is evidenced by the
powerful instrument the Consumers' League found in advertising
against firms that maintained particularly unsanitary
and morally degrading working conditions for their employees,
or the dread that hotels and department stores have for
adverse