o apply his beliefs in the practical conduct of life, the
position is different. There are now good reasons why his attitude
should be in some ways less inflexible. The society in which he is
placed is a very ancient and composite growth. The people from whom he
dissents have not come by their opinions, customs, and institutions by a
process of mere haphazard. These opinions and customs all had their
origin in a certain real or supposed fitness. They have a certain depth
of root in the lives of a proportion of the existing generation. Their
fitness for satisfying human needs may have vanished, and their
congruity with one another may have come to an end. That is only one
side of the truth. The most zealous propagandism cannot penetrate to
them. The quality of bearing to be transplanted from one kind of soil
and climate to another is not very common, and it is far from being
inexhaustible even where it exists.

In common language we speak of a generation as something possessed of a
kind of exact unity, with all its parts and members one and homogeneous.
Yet very plainly it is not this. It is a whole, but a whole in a state
of constant flux. Its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It is
not one, but many generations. Each of the seven ages of man is
neighbour to all the rest. The column of the veterans is already
staggering over into the last abyss, while the column of the newest
recruits is forming with all its nameless and uncounted hopes. To each
its tradition, its tendency, its possibilities. Only a proportion of
each in one society can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of a new
truth, and endurance enough to bear it along rugged and untrodden ways.

And then, as we have said, one must remember the stuff of which life is
made. One must consider what an overwhelming preponderance of the most
tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be
absorbed between material cares and the solicitude of the affections. It
is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one's time,
because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs, and
slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it.
Men and women have to live. The task for most of them is arduous enough
to make them well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as they find
in the use and wont of daily existence. To insist on a whole community
being made at once to submit to the reign of new pra