passed
the period of rack and stake; but social and business ostracism are
pretty effective, while occasionally there are suggestions of
tar-buckets or bullets. For the most part, however, we content
ourselves with denouncing the proposer of any marked departure from
existing political or sociological conditions as a "socialist," a
"communist," and an "anarchist," using these terms indiscriminately as
abusive epithets without any definite knowledge of their meaning. From
the beginning of time every social advance--and until recently every
forward step in science or religion has been regarded as menacing the
very foundations of society. The Reform Act of 1832, which simply took
the first step towards correcting the grossest political abuses, was
looked upon by the Duke of Wellington and other good men as
threatening the very existence of the kingdom. The condition of
affairs then existing, they considered, if not the best possible, at
any rate vastly better than the political chaos that would be sure to
result from change. Speaking on this blind conservative opposition to
the Reform Bill, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, said:

"All the resistance to these natural changes can effect is to derange
their operation, and make them act violently and mischievously instead
of healthfully, or at least harmlessly. The old state of things is gone
past recall, and all the efforts of all the tories cannot save it; but
they may by their folly, as they did in France, get us a wild democracy
or a military despotism in the room of it, instead of letting it change
quietly into what it is, merely a new modification of the old state. One
would think that people who talk against change were literally as well
as metaphorically blind, and really did not see that everything in
themselves and around them is changing every hour by the necessary law
of its being.

"There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so
unnatural and so convulsive to society, as the strain to keep things
fixed, when all the world is, by the very law of its creation, in
eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be
traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and
corruption--that our business is to preserve and not to improve."

In his retrospect of the Victorian reign, in the June Review of Reviews,
W.T. Stead says: "It is to the stoutest conservatives of our time almost
inconceivable that rational beings could ever have