from living their lives freely
and after their own convictions. As has been strikingly
pointed out by Hilaire Belloc and Hobson, one of the greatest
evils of our present hit-or-miss methods of employment is
the fear of "losing his job," the uncomfortable feeling of
insecurity often felt by the workingman who, having so
frequently nothing to store up against a rainy day, lives in
perpetual fear of sickness or discharge.

In earlier times fear of the consequences of expressing dissent
from established opinions and beliefs was one of the
chief sources of social inertia. Where excommunication, torture,
and death followed dissent, it is not surprising that men
feared to be dissenters. In contemporary society under
normal conditions men have much less to fear in the way of
punishment, but may accept the traditional and conventional
because they fear the consequences of being different,
even if those consequences are not anything more serious than
a personal snub.

While men fear to dissent because of the disapproval to
which they may be subjected, dissent, the novel and strange
in action and opinion are themselves feared by most men
because of the unknown and unpredictable consequences to
which they may lead. Men were at first afraid of the steam-engine
and the locomotive. Men still fear novel political and
social ideas before they can possibly understand what they
have to be afraid of. The fact that thought so continually
turns up the novel and the strange is, according to Bertrand
Russell, precisely the reason why most men are afraid to
think. And fear of the novel, the strange, the unaccustomed
is, as in the case of many other instincts, a perfectly natural
means of protection that would otherwise have to be sought
by elaborate processes of reason. In what we call prudence,
caution, and care, fear undoubtedly plays some part, and
Plato long ago pointed out it is only the fool, not the brave
man, who is utterly unafraid.[l]

[Footnote 1: _Protagoras_.]

Psychologists may be said to differ largely as to the utility
of fear. They are nearly all agreed that in the forest life
which was man's originally, fear had its specific marked
advantages. Open spaces, dark caverns, loud noises were
undoubtedly associated very frequently with danger to the
primitive savage, and an instinctive recoil from these centers
of disaster was undoubtedly of survival value. But there is
an increasing tendency to discount the utility of fe