Let us now glance at the effect on the group whose ways are being laughed at. To be the object of another set’s ridicule, especially when we have the right of retort, so far from necessarily weakening our hold on that which is {272} ridiculed may strengthen it. When we are strongly attached, others’ laughter may make us cling the more firmly to what we cherish. Laughter in this case is, indeed, as we have seen, an excellent training in a good-natured suffering of others’ ridicule, a training which has in it the virtue of a moral tonic. Yet this inter-groupal laughter is not wholly subservient to the maintenance of characteristic differences. In all the higher forms of society, at least, such ridicule has an assimilative action as well. It manages to some extent, by inducing self-criticism, to get rid of useless excrescences. Thus, it helps to keep down class-vanity, the professional narrowness which cries, “There’s nothing like leather!” a narrowness which is so delightfully satirised by Molière in the wranglings of M. Jourdain’s professors. The correction of this exclusive feeling of self-importance of a group by outside laughter has always been at work, helping to keep groups in friendly touch, and hindering the sectional or professional _esprit de corps_ from overpowering the larger social consciousness which we call national sentiment, and the common-sense of the community. Of this last more will be said presently. So far, we have illustrated the bearing on the ways of laughter of what may be called the structural features of societies. There has been no reference to the effects of social movements, of all that is meant by the successive changes of fashion in manners, dress and so forth, and of those more persistent movements which make up what we call social progress. The least reflection will show that in this continual flux of things social, the unceasing modifications of the head-covering and the rest, and the trampling down of old beliefs and institutions by the resistless “march of intellect,” we have at least as large a field for the gambols {273} of the laughing spirit as in the distinctions and oddly combined relations of classes. We may best begin by referring to the movements of fashion. These may be defined as changes in dress, manners and so forth, which are marked off from the improvements entering into progress by two circumstances: (1) that they are capricious, not the products of a rational choice of the best; and (2) that they are of comparatively short duration. When we call a mode of doing a thing a fashion, we imply, quite unknowingly perhaps, that it has not the cachet of a change for the better, and that as such it has no security of tenure.