Much that has shown a vigorous power of survival all through history we believe to be harmful, as, for example, drink, prostitution, and many forms of superstition. Scarcely anything has swept over the world more triumphantly than the tobacco habit, which, to say the least, is under suspicion. Professor Keller reminds us that there are such things as harmful _mores_, and he instances a number of customs relating to marriage that are clearly of this kind.[78] The scruples of the people of India about killing poisonous snakes result in an immense increase of these animals, and of human deaths. Many of the ancient beliefs surviving in backward parts of our own country regarding the sowing of crops only when the “sign of the moon” is favorable, and the like, are of a similar nature. The fact that extremes of riches and poverty, subjection of women and domination of one class over another have existed throughout history is no proof that such conditions are innocuous, but merely that they have not been so destructive as to prevent survival. And, in general, we may say of the social system that comes down to us from the past that, while as a whole and in its longer tested parts it has proved capable of life, we have no reason to think that this life is of the highest kind practicable. In a time of rapid change the struggle of ideas becomes both more intense and more confused. The social whole is in somewhat the position of a man who has been thrown out of his old occupation and is trying to establish himself in a new one: many questions press upon him at once, while the rules and habits he has been used to go by do not suit the changed conditions. In a more settled time there are traditional beliefs which serve as accepted standards of judgment—as the Scriptures or the writings of the Fathers have served in the history of the church. But in our own period—though we are no doubt too much in it to judge truly of its character—it seems that hardly any authority remains, that we have to create the law as well as make decisions under it. The effort of intelligence to find a rational course in such a time results in a somewhat anarchic conflict of diverse interpretations. Extreme views of many sorts are urged, and there is no accredited arbiter to decide among them. “And a vast noise of rights, wrongs, powers, needs, —Cries of new faiths that called ‘This way is plain,’ Grindings of upper against lower greeds, Fond sighs for old things, shouts for new,—did reign.”[79] In the midst of this the ordinary individual, who has no taste for complex thought but longs only for peace with honor, is often in a sad condition. He is like the little neutral country caught up into the struggle of contending Powers and overrun by all of them, unable to stand alone or to find a sure support.