As an outcome of the
cumulative action of these factors, the generation which follows
a season of war is apt to witness a rehabilitation of the element
of status, both in its social life and in its scheme of devout
observances and other symbolic or ceremonial forms. Throughout
the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the seventies
also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more
direct and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian
temperament, such as the recrudescence of outlawry and the
spectacular quasi-predatory careers of fraud run by certain
"captains of industry", came to a head earlier and were
appreciably on the decline by the close of the seventies. The
recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to have
passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still
remoter and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic
sense; and these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more
slowly and reached their most effective development at a still
later date.
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