But we cannot select unless we can place comparative values on the various things life offers us, and we cannot value them unless we have arrived at some standard of value. The only standard is what we consider a worthwhile life for each of us individually. For various reasons the tyranny of crowd opinion has always been greater in America than in most civilized countries, but it is, of course, one of the great dangers of democracy everywhere. Many people seem to believe that the life of the savage is one of delightful independence, of doing what suits himself all day long. No idea could be further from the truth. The savage is hemmed and circumscribed at almost every point in his personal life by the mores of his tribe. Liberty, freedom of speech and action, the right and opportunity for free self-expression, are among the highest products of civilization, not of savagery, and the belief that the reverse is the case is merely an example[Pg 295] of the present day tendency to exalt the ideal of savagery and to return on our tracks, evident in all the arts. Democracy, a certain weariness of the complexities of that very process of civilization that has made freedom possible, and the misunderstood teachings of scientific research, all three are tending to make the tyranny of the crowd greater and an art of life more difficult. In a recent American prize contest for definitions of morality, for example, one of the three which won prizes was as follows: “Morality is that form of human behavior conceded to be virtuous by the conventions of the group to which the individual belongs,” and we are told that among all the definitions submitted there was little disagreement as to the general concept. Of course this is the muddiest sort of thinking. The particular social forms which morality takes among the crowd at any given time is confused with morality itself, and, if the definition were true, any advance in moral concepts on the part of either society or the individual would become impossible, as no society ever changed its “moral” opinions unanimously overnight. That such a definition should have become the general one in America is merely an interesting example of the difficulty amongst us of disentangling one’s individual self from the glutinous mass of all one’s compatriots and fellow Rotarians and Christian Endeavorers.