p into sheer pedantry and Pharisaism, an insistence on
the fixed form when the intent is changed or forgotten, a regard
for the letter rather than the spirit of the law. In a large
number of cases, the fixed modes of life and practice which
are our inheritance come to be regarded as symbols of eternal
and changeless values. Thus many highly intelligent men
find ritual in religion and traditional customs in education
or in social life freighted with symbolic significance, and any
infringement of them as almost sacrilegious in character.

[Footnote 2: It has been said that a custom repeated on a college
campus two years in succession constitutes a tradition.]

CHANGE SYNONYMOUS WITH EVIL. Change, again, may be discouraged
by those who hold, with more or less sincerity, that
no good can come of it. Such a position may, and frequently
is, maintained by those in whom fortunate accident of birth,
favored social position, exuberant optimism, or a stanch and
resilient faith, induces the belief that the social order and
social practices, education, law, customs, economic conditions,
science, art, _et al._, are completely satisfactory. Like
Pippa, in Browning's poem, they are satisfied that "God's
in His Heaven; all's right with the world." That there
are no imperfections, in manners, politics, or morals, in
our present social order, that there are no improvements
which good-will, energy, and intelligence can effect, few will
maintain without qualification. To do so implies, when sincere,
extraordinary blindness to the facts, for example, of
poverty and disease, which, though they do not happen to
touch a particular individual, are patent and ubiquitous
enough. In the face of undeniable evils the position that the
ways we have inherited are completely adequate to our
contemporary problems cannot be ingenuously maintained.

The position more generally expounded by the opponents of
change is that our present modes of life give us the best
possible results, considering the limitations of nature and human
nature, and that the customs, institutions, and ideas we now
have are the fruits of a ripe, a mellow, and a time-tested
wisdom, that any radical innovations would, on the whole, put
us in a worse position than that in which we find ourselves.
Persons taking this attitude discount every suggested
improvement on the ground that, even though intrinsically
good, it will bring a host of inevitable evils with it, and that,
all thin