herever we are conscious of an evil we remedy it, and therefore
always seem to ourselves to be progressing, forgetting that most of the
evils we see are the effects, finally become acute, of long-unnoticed
retrogressions; that our compromising remedies seldom fully recover the
lost ground; above all, that on the lines along which we are
degenerating, good has become evil in our eyes, and is being undone in
the name of progress precisely as evil is undone and replaced by good on
the lines along which we are evolving. This is indeed the Illusion of
Illusions; for it gives us infallible and appalling assurance that if
our political ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent reformers
and supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps in
our progress. Let the Reformer, the Progressive, the Meliorist then
reconsider himself and his eternal ifs and ans which never become pots
and pans. Whilst Man remains what he is, there can be no progress
beyond the point already attained and fallen headlong from at every
attempt at civilization; and since even that point is but a pinnacle to
which a few people cling in giddy terror above an abyss of squalor, mere
progress should no longer charm us.

VIII

THE CONCEIT OF CIVILIZATION

After all, the progress illusion is not so very subtle. We begin by
reading the satires of our fathers' contemporaries; and we conclude
(usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things of
the past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequently
produced by the sectional shifting of political power from oppressors to
oppressed. The poor man is given a vote by the Liberals in the hope
that he will cast it for his emancipators. The hope is not fulfilled;
but the lifelong imprisonment of penniless men for debt ceases; Factory
Acts are passed to mitigate sweating; schooling is made free and
compulsory; sanitary by-laws are multiplied; public steps are taken to
house the masses decently; the bare-footed get boots; rags become rare;
and bathrooms and pianos, smart tweeds and starched collars, reach
numbers of people who once, as "the unsoaped," played the Jew's harp or
the accordion in moleskins and belchers. Some of these changes are
gains: some of them are losses. Some of them are not changes at all:
all of them are merely the changes that money makes. Still, they
produce an illusion of bustling progress; and the reading class infers
from them th