Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/542

500 very resistances which divergence from them entails—he none the less, on his return home, finds his actions in social intercourse determined by the same need of conforming to some larger or smaller group of which he may happen for the time to be a member. It is because of this "doing at Rome as Rome does" that social gatherings are said to succeed best and to be most enjoyable when the guests are all alike each other on certain social sides of human nature, or are willing to appear to be thus alike during the period of their association. The fact that the social code, as it is sometimes called, frowns upon the guest who would take more than his share of the attention or time of the company, and encourages the host to an equal distribution of his favors to all of them alike—this shows how thoroughly, even in the social circle, imitation of the group is the direction of greatest ease, and how it is the stress of the resistances offered to unlikeness by the group as a whole which impels the members of it to those acts of imitation by which they are more or less temporarily assimilated.

The very description, again, of costumes as de rigueur for certain special occasions contains a suggestion of the resistance which the social group opposes to unlikenesses in dress. The attacks sometimes made upon strangely attired persons in so highly conservative a country as China have had their parallels even in the highly progressive countries of Europe and America. A similar antagonism is manifested to nonconformity in social manners; and all formulæ of such manners—the etiquette at baptisms, weddings, and funerals; established methods of paying and receiving visits; prescriptions of what to do and what not to do at the dinner table—are simply means, among those who attach importance to these minutiæ, of avoiding the resistances that would inevitably be encountered were there many ways, instead of a generically common manner, of behaving on social occasions.

The resistance offered to unlikenesses among associated individuals is also announced in that universal human character, the passion for equality among men—the tendency, however vaguely or vividly it may be felt, to insist upon it that those with whom we come into contact shall, in as many respects as possible, be likes of ourselves. Jealousy of special privilege, with its spirit embodied in such phrases as "fair play," "start equal," "share and share alike," "a fair field and no favor," begins to manifest itself very early in the life of the individual: mere children, when associated, insist in multifarious ways on likeness of treatment; anything like favoritism in the distribution of gifts or the bestowal of attention, as well as all unfair advantage in games, they resent with surprising promptness and vigor, often also with indignation. In adults this jealousy of unequalness finds