mothering the process and alert in detecting its
growth are by no means constantly aware of any great change. For even the
fondest mother cannot watch her child grow.

I remember how tremendously surprised I was in visiting Russia several
years ago to find that in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested in
all sorts of things besides the revolution. I had expected every Russian
to be absorbed in the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions of
what a revolution ought to be were contradicted everywhere. And I assure
you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling
perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where
Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no
very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So
much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect.
The anti-climax is almost always omitted.

Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's description of the siege
of Paris in "The Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many people. It
is hard to believe that daily life continues with its stretches of
boredom and its personal interests even while the enemy is bombarding a
city. How much more difficult is it to imagine a revolution that is to
come--to space it properly through a long period of time, to conceive
what it will be like to the people who live through it. Almost all social
prediction is catastrophic and absurdly simplified. Even those who talk
of the slow "evolution" of society are likely to think of it as a series
of definite changes easily marked and well known to everybody. It is what
Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking his private emotions
for a public movement.

Even though the next century is full of dramatic episodes--the collapse
of governments and labor wars--these events will be to the social
revolution what the smashing of machines in Lancashire was to the
industrial revolution. The reality that is worthy of attention is a
change in the very texture and quality of millions of lives--a change
that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect of history.

The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution:
not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas
the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a
measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a
revolution, we must not