in business, scholarship, science, or literature,
demands perseverance in definite courses of action. We are
inclined, and usually with reason, to suspect the effectiveness
of a man who has half a dozen professions in half as
many years. Such vacillations produce whimsical and scattered
movements; but they are fruitless in results; they literally
"get nowhere."

[Footnote 1: The uncertainty that business men feel during a
presidential campaign is an illustration.]

[Footnote 2: See _ante_, p. 10.]

Just as, in the case of individuals, any significant achievements
require persistent convergence of means toward a definite
end, so is it in the case of social groups. No great business
organizations are built up through continual variations
of policy. Similarly, in the building up of a university, a
government department, a state, or a social order, consecutive
and disciplined persistence in established ways is a requisite
of progress. Without such continuous organization of efforts
toward fixed goals, action becomes frivolous and fragmentary,
a wind along a waste. The history of the English people has
elicited the admiration of philosophers and historians because
it has been such a gradual and deliberate movement, such a
measured and certain progress toward political and social
freedom. To those who appreciate the value of unity of
action, of the assured fruits of cumulative and consistent
action along a given path, change as such seems fraught with
danger. Nor is it specific dangers they fear so much as the
loss of moral fiber, the scattering of energies, the waste and
futility that are frequently the net result of casual driftings
with every wind that blows. No one has more eloquently
expressed this view than Edmund Burke in his _Reflections on
the French Revolution:_

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth
and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors
and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received
from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act
as if they were the entire masters; that they should think it among
their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance,
by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their
society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin
instead of a habitation--and teaching these successors as little to
respect their contrivances, as they had themselv