The formation of social groups further enlarges the material and the opportunities for laughter by introducing noticeable and impressive differences of behaviour, dress and speech. In this way the field of the odd, the absurd, that which contradicts our own customs and standards, has been made wide and fertile. A mere difference of locality may suffice to generate such differences. Not so many years ago, one could hear in the West of England the {261} jibes which the people in one small town or district were wont to hurl at those in another. We read that in the Middle Ages, when local differences of dress and speech were so much more marked than now, satires on people of particular localities were not uncommon—though probably much more than a perception of the laughably odd was involved in these rather fierce derisions.[228] The immediate utility of this mirthful quizzing of other sets would, like that carried out by one savage tribe on another, consist in the preservation of the characteristics of one’s own set. But the play of laughter about class-distinctions illustrates another of its benefits. When one set gets used to the distinctive ways of another, it tends to regard them as right and proper for the latter; and it may carry its regard for their propriety so far as to support the inner sentiment of the other group by deriding those members who do not conform to their group-customs. Distinctive customs have been conserved not only—to adopt ethical terms having a somewhat different meaning—by “internal sanctions” in the shape of serious penalties as well as ridicule administered by fellow-members of the set, but by “external sanctions” in the shape of outside mockery. The imposing soldierly attitude has perhaps been kept up quite as much by the merry quizzing of civilians as by any military discipline and _esprit de corps_. A poor tottering hero in uniform could, one opines, never have escaped the eye of citizens lying in wait for the laughable.