The coerciveness of the crowd makes for national unity, but it has unwelcome features. It is too likely to lead to a high disregard of the rights of the nonconformist and an unsympathetic and uncompromising attitude towards other nations. There are no incentives to broad-minded thought and sympathy within a homogeneous crowd. Opposition is the real matrix out of which reason and tolerance are extracted. The government of the United States of America had a tolerant spirit stamped upon it because the makers of our institutions were many men of many minds. The only way to do justice to their differences was by compromise. Close agreement confirms convictions, but does not stimulate the imagination. “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. But whatever he does think, he can think with all his soul.”[56] Without the differences it is more than likely that America would not have been quite so tolerant. It follows that the nation, because it has no critic to which it listens, is likely to be hard-minded, fanatical, and unyielding. The atmosphere in which the individual lives and moves and has his being is that of his people’s customs or mores. These are intellectualized folkways. Folkways are the group’s ways of dealing with its environment. Mores are the folkways plus the convictions as to their relation to welfare. Sumner defines them as follows: “The mores are the folkways, including the philosophical and ethical generalizations as to societal welfare which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as they grow.”[57] Tradition, which is crowd-memory, perpetuates the mores, and they become the life _milieu_ of the individuals of each generation. A large part of one’s education, especially his moral education, is gained from the traditions and mores of his people. And their teachings are all the more authoritative because one is almost wholly unconscious of learning from them. “We learn the mores as unconsciously as we learn to walk and eat and breathe. The masses never learn how we walk, and eat, and breathe, and they never know any reason why the mores are what they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the bonds of tradition, custom, and habit.... The most important fact about the mores is their dominion over the individual. Arising he knows not whence or how, they meet his opening mind in earliest childhood, give him his outfit of ideas, faiths, and tastes, and lead him into prescribed mental processes. They bring to him codes of action, standards, and rules of ethics.”[58]