worked and the stockings they knitted are become
superfluous through the action of the modern loom, yet more are their
social institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily and
increasingly unfitted to our use; and friction and suffering inevitable,
especially for the most advanced and modified individuals in our
societies. This suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three
causes.

Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of change
tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already
hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree
ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.

Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human
society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions,
or being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost
unparalleled dissimilarity has today arisen between the different
individuals composing our societies; where, side by side with men and
women who have rapidly adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt
themselves to the new conditions of knowledge and new conditions of
life, that, were they to reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated
societies, they might perhaps hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be
found men and women whose social, religious, and moral ideals would not
constitute them out of harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the
remote forbears of the human race; while, between these extreme classes
lies that large mass of persons in an intermediate state of development.
This diversity is bound to cause friction and suffering in the
interactions of the members of our societies; more especially, as the
individuals composing each type are not sorted out into classes and
families, but are found scattered through all classes and grades in our
societies. (One of the women holding the most advanced and modern view
of the relation of woman to life whom we have met was the wife of a
Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her living by the
sewing of the uppers of men's boots.) Persons bound by the closest ties
of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual intercourse,
are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of adaptation
to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction and
consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and
almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossib