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power which would not otherwise be attainable. If there were no foundation for custom and law in our moral constitution, the results of social instruction and discipline would be much less than they now are. With this grave advantage afforded by the frequent coincidence of our moral constitution and social customs, the theory still plainly fails to cover the facts. It should be observed, moreover, that man's habitual disobedience to moral law weakens its authority, obscures its phenomena, and thus greatly aids the effort to confound it with conventional rule. Notwithstanding these causes of obscuration, we believe a better theory still remains visible in the facts.

(1) We have repeated examples of what general agreement and enforcement can accomplish, and the results are of another kind from those arising under true moral force. Take again, from another point of view, the illustration afforded by fashion. A kind of censure to which the masses of men are exceedingly sensitive, is constantly and unsparingly inflicted on those who disregard fashion. Yet the most infatuated devotee of the fickle goddess would hardly venture to regard scrupulous obedience as a virtue. Such an one is quite content if she escapes positive censure in her fashionable follies. How very different, also, the feeling arising from a violated fashion, from wearing a proscribed coat or hat, from that which affects the sensitive soul under the sense of wrong action. Allow each violator to be equally appreciative of the law whose precepts have been infringed, and we have, in the one case, mortification, and in the other guilt. The most scrupulous observance of the details of fashion, of fashion enforced by two thirds of the community, can not, does not, bestow the sense of virtue; nor disobedience the feeling of vice.

Take again the standard of honor enforced among certain classes, as among soldiers, or gamblers, or on the Stock