Such are the products of social suggestion. What is its process?
The first noose thrown over the neck of inclination is example. Whatever kind of family type, social manners, neighborly helpfulness, trade practice, business transaction, civic activity, or patriotic sacrifice becomes common tends to draw the practice of individuals in its wake. Standard conduct becomes a fashion, and is imitated as a style of dress is imitated, even at cost to the imitator. To approximate this social pattern is often mere drifting, oars in lap. Consider the difference between succumbing to the prevailing standard and surmounting it. It is the difference between the sinking of the released pendulum to its nadir, and its rising on the other side. Not to deceive the assessor is one thing; to produce overlooked property is another. They are alike in principle, but the latter means much more, because it transcends the ordinary practice. There is one merit of the lawyer who will not cheat his client, a far greater merit of the lawyer who will not cheat the jury about his client. Yet the difference is simply that the one is borne up by the example of his profession, while the other unaided rises above it.
Again there is the force of expectation, which is by no means identical with example. Even if the general practice is low, men pitch high their expectation of how another is going to act. As he who circulates a subscription paper professes to expect much more than there is any hope of getting, so society assumes for each a behavior above the average attainment. The moral sentiments that are applauded on the stage or the platform, that each professes to act on, and that each professes to expect everybody else to act on, by no means underlie actual practice. Yet it is not for a Juvenal or a Zola to abolish this gap between expectation and reality. The satirist has his day, but the generations belong to the optimist. Only in times of moral decay, when society is dropping to pieces, docs the cynic give tone to current belief, discussion, and literature. Usually it is the book, the play, the poem, the sermon, the appeal, that takes good instincts for granted, deems the great heart of the people sound, assumes high
