Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and MoralsSumner, William Graham
General
Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
Sumner, William Graham
Manners and customs
+92. Russia.+ When Napoleon said: "If you scratch a Russian you find a
Tartar," what he had perceived was that, although the Russian court and
the capital city have been westernized by the will of the tsars,
nevertheless the people still cling to the strongly marked national
mores of their ancestors. The tsars, since Peter the Great, have, by
their policing and dragooning, spoilt one thing without making another,
and socially Russia is in the agonies of the resulting confusion. Russia
ought to be a democracy by virtue of its sparse population and wide area
of unoccupied land in Siberia. In fact all the indigenous and most
ancient usages of the villages are democratic. The autocracy is exotic
and military. It is, however, the only institution which holds Russia
together as a unit. On account of this political interest the small
intelligent class acquiesce in the autocracy. The autocracy imposes
force on the people to crush out their inherited mores, and to force on
them western institutions. The policy is, moreover, vacillating. At one
time the party which favored westernizing has prevailed at court; at
another time the old Russian or pan-Slavic party. There is internal
discord and repression. The ultimate result of such an attempt to
control mores by force is an interesting question of the future. It
also is a question which affects most seriously the interests of western
civilization. The motive for the westernizing policy is to get influence
in European politics. All the interference of Russia in European
politics is harmful, menacing, and unjustifiable. She is not, in
character, a European power, and she brings no contribution to European
civilization, but the contrary. She has neither the capital nor the
character to enable her to execute the share in the world's affairs
which she is assuming. Her territorial extensions for two hundred years
have been made at the cost of her internal strength. The latter has
never been at all proportioned to the former. Consequently the debt and
taxes due to her policy of expansion and territorial greatness have
crushed her peasant class, and by their effect on agriculture have
choked the sources of national strength. The people are peaceful and
industrious, and their traditional mores are such that they would
develop great productive power and in time rise to a strong civilization
of a truly indigenous type, if they were free to use their powers in
their own way to satisfy their interests as they experience them from
the life conditions which they have to meet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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