Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/41

 Rh This must suffice as a rapid survey of a vast subject. My purpose throughout has been purely methodological, namely, to call attention to the essential nature of the supreme object of our research. I have insisted that the student of folklore must ever keep in touch with the movement, the vital thrust, of present reality, instead of approaching history in the spirit of a sexton. But it would exceed my aim no less than my powers to put this principle into practice, by appending a commentary on the European crisis. At most, then, let me acknowledge the eventfulness of the times in a few parting observations. The war is changing all values. So thorough a shuffling must rearrange every card in the pack. Men will come out of this struggle for liberty either less equal or more equal than before. If the cause of equality succeed—if the philosophy, or rather the religion, of the future be that men, though undoubtedly unequal on a mechanical and functional view of society, are nevertheless equal in a spiritual and vital sense—then we may expect the gradual correction of that disparity of social level that hitherto has confined the folk within a narrow world of their own. Spiritual equality, however, is not to be achieved by the bare recitation of a creed. There must be practical realization of the truth that the final cause of the state is not to manage affairs but rather to educate. Shall we say, then, that by education the folk must be abolished in the interest of the people?

To the members of the Folklore Society, however, it may not appear at the first blush that "'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd." They will be apt to say in their hearts: No pheasant, no sport; no folk, no science of folklore. I can assure them that survivals, which Tylor, the inventor of the term, identifies with superstitions, are not confined to the folk, as anyone knows who is making a collection of the superstitions resuscitated among all classes by the