The inevitable specialism of our age adds to the confusion. Life is a connected whole, yet neither research nor reform can now be other than sectional. We devote ourselves to a candid study of some particular reform, and we find it a thoroughly reasonable proposal, a deduction from principles that we are bound to admit. But we have not had leisure to discover the indisputable principles of other reforms; and, when we hear the demand of change and progress rising on one side after another--in the Church, the State, the Home, the School, and so on--we remark sententiously that rebellion is becoming a fashion, that our generation is getting feverish or neurotic, that we must insist on authority somewhere. We repeat plausible phrases about the decay of respect and the wisdom of the race. We fasten on symptoms of disorder--without inquiring very closely whether the disorder is new or has been recently aggravated--and we conclude that conservatism is a social duty: that, at all events, we will admit reform only by the inch. We fancy ourselves the guardians of the _palladium_.
Quite apart from purely selfish motives, some of the closest observers of our age do differ radically in diagnosis and prescription. The same movements are symptoms of health to one man, symptoms of disease to another. Take the enlargement of divorce, the decay of clerical authority, the industrial revolt, or the rebellion of women. There seems to be no common ground left on which the observers may meet with any hope of agreement. The old religious and political standards will now hopelessly divide any roomful of educated men and women. You propose, perhaps, to fall back on moral standards--the ground on which "all reasonable people" unite--and someone quotes against you half a dozen of the most brilliant writers of Europe and America. Hopes and lamentations, inspired by precisely the same facts of life, mingle confusedly in our literature, and men and women of large heart and little leisure seem to be condemned to a sterile perplexity or a selfish absorption in business and pleasure. What, at all events, is the meaning or purpose of life? And how is this spreading rebellion related to it?
First let us examine the grounds of the very distressing forecasts of the Conservative. In the vast majority of cases that are worth examining one will find that the pessimism has not very firm foundations. Your dismal prophet is usually a man with an ancient gospel which we are discarding, or a new gospel which does not attract us. The appeal to the modern world, he realises, must be utilitarian: he must show us that, without him, we perish. So he recklessly heaps up before our eyes statistics of crime and consumption and lunacy and alcohol: he makes weird and totally inaccurate statements about France or the United States or some other country: he marshals the shades of dead empires--which seem to have died of a wonderful complication of modern maladies--before us with appropriate rhetoric.