It is hard to condemn such conduct when we remember the
appalling contrast between the weakness of the individual and the strength of a
social order coextensive with civilisation itself. But in this spirit of reasonable
submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally unreasonable, in
this conviction that the bad could not be bettered by reforms of detail, there
was more danger to society than in the crass indifference of the selfish and
the unreflecting. When the natural leaders of society avow that they despair of
the future, fatalism spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file,
until even discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here.
The idealists
pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their fortunes and their
lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual patrimony. Just as a
government deteriorates when it is no longer tested by continual reference to
principles of justice, so a Utopia, however magnificent, fades from the mind of
the believer when he ceases to revise it by comparison with facts, when it is
no longer a reply to the problems suggested by workaday experience. Life and
theory being once divorced, the theorist becomes a vendor of commonplaces, and
the plain man is fortified in his conviction that he must take life as he finds
it.
