em of consanguinity, or of private property, or of the
theistic faith, in any country of the Western civilization; or suppose
the suppression of ancestor worship in China, or of the caste system in
india, or of slavery in Africa, or the establishment of equality of the
sexes in Mohammedan countries. It needs no argument to show that the
derangement of the general structure of conventionalities in any of
these cases would be very considerable. In order to effect such an
innovation a very far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought
would be involved also at other points of the scheme than the one
immediately in question. The aversion to any such innovation amounts to
a shrinking from an essentially alien scheme of life.

The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from the
accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday experience. It
is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense salutary advice
and admonition to the community express themselves forcibly upon the
far-reaching pernicious effects which the community would suffer from
such relatively slight changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican
Church, an increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage,
prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages,
abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one of these
innovations would, we are told, "shake the social structure to its
base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality,"
"make life intolerable," "confound the order of nature," etc. These
various locutions are, no doubt, of the nature of hyperbole; but, at the
same time, like all overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense
of the gravity of the consequences which they are intended to describe.
The effect of these and like innovations in deranging the accepted
scheme of life is felt to be of much graver consequence than the simple
alteration of an isolated item in a series of contrivances for the
convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious a degree of
innovations of first-rate importance is true in a less degree of changes
of a smaller immediate importance. The aversion to change is in large
part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any
given change will necessitate; and this solidarity of the system of
institutions of any given culture or of any given people strengthens the
instinctive resistance offered to any change in men's habi