One of the best examples of the combined effect of hostility and a desire to agree is to be found in the humours of the market place. The relation of buyer and seller seems to be pregnant with opportunities for merry fooling on either side. The direct and sharply felt opposition of interest is apt to beget a good deal of the rough sort of “taking down”. Not only will the tongue be stirred to derisive attack, the situation may even beget retaliations in the shape of practical jokes. The merchant, as the expert, has always had the upper hand in the contest of wits. His customer has had to find consolation in satires on the cheat, such as those which were common in the Middle Ages.[240] On the other hand, the need of coming to an agreement has served to bring into the haggling process a good deal of the conciliative kind of laughter. The vendor has always known the value of good-natured banter as an instrument {271} of persuasion. This overflow of the spirit of fun into the channels of serious business may still be seen as a faint survival in front of a cheap-Jack’s van. George Eliot has given us a charming picture of the play of this spirit in the south in her chapter on “The Peasants’ Fair” in _Romola_. The same intrusion of fun as an auxiliary into the business relations of groups is seen in many other cases where opposition has to be toned down and a _modus vivendi_ arrived at, as in that of opposed political parties, religious bodies and the like. The appearance of the laughing imp, if only he behaves himself, in these rather warm encounters of groups serves to cool the atmosphere and to temper animosity by at least a momentary experience of genial contact. It does much, indeed, to tone down the uneasy and half-suspicious attitude which members of any group are apt to take up on first having to do with those of a strange group, especially one of higher rank. We may now summarise the chief social utilities of the reciprocal laughter of classes at the ways of other classes. In the first place, it helps, like the laughter of the savage tribe at the ways of other tribes, to counteract any tendency to imitate the manners and customs of foreign groups. What we have laughed at, we are not likely to adopt. This is the self-protective function of laughter. To laugh at the ways of another group is, moreover, in most cases at least, to indulge in a feeling of our own superiority; and this attitude would have a further conservative tendency, especially when it is the laugh of the expert in his own department at the outside ignoramus.