t society was divided
into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
between Philistia and Bohemia.

When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that,
you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all
others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict
and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and
those who regard it as a problem to be solved.

The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example
of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service,
in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as
unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the
tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from
under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human,
temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens
above him is nothing but the roof.

He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel,
as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.

If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the
habits that our ancestors created. The average conser