hich it
does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right
steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a
cause, but a law. It explains the source, and marks the immovable
limitations, of social energy. But social energy itself can never be
superseded either by evolution or by anything else.

The reproach of being impracticable and artificial attaches by rights
not to those who insist on resolute, persistent, and uncompromising
efforts to remove abuses, but to a very different class--to those,
namely, who are credulous enough to suppose that abuses and bad customs
and wasteful ways of doing things will remove themselves. This
credulity, which is a cloak for indolence or ignorance or stupidity,
overlooks the fact that there are bodies of men, more or less numerous,
attached by every selfish interest they have to the maintenance of these
abusive customs. 'A plan,' says Bentham, 'may be said to be too good to
be practicable, where, without adequate inducement in the shape of
personal interest, it requires for its accomplishment that some
individual or class of individuals shall have made a sacrifice of his or
their personal interest to the interest of the whole. When it is on the
part of a body of men or a multitude of individuals taken at random that
any such sacrifice is reckoned upon, then it is that in speaking of the
plan the term _Utopian_ may without impropriety be applied.' And this is
the very kind of sacrifice which must be anticipated by those who so
misunderstand the doctrine of evolution as to believe that the world is
improved by some mystic and self-acting social discipline, which
dispenses with the necessity of pertinacious attack upon institutions
that have outlived their time, and interests that have lost their
justification.

We are thus brought to the position--to which, indeed, bare observation
of actual occurrences might well bring us, if it were not for the
clouding disturbances of selfishness, or of a true philosophy of society
wrongly applied--that a society can only pursue its normal course by
means of a certain progression of changes, and that these changes can
only be initiated by individuals or very small groups of individuals.
The progressive tendency can only be a tendency, it can only work its
way through the inevitable obstructions around it, by means of persons
who are possessed by the special progressive idea. Such ideas do not
spring up un