d. Conversely, most imaginative people
are Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of right
because he has intelligence enough to understand that things might be
better managed in the future for all than they are in the present.

But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, I
mean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in their
own minds any state of things very different from the one they have been
born and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They can
conceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely--because they have
always heard things once were so, and because the past is generally
realisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to the
present. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination fails
them. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of every
proposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London,
such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insoluble
problem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they think
it would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal league
for the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the fact
that the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union,
for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of the
Swiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seem
almost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" said
Napoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trained
in the school of the French Revolution--which was _not_ carried out by
unimaginative pettifoggers.

To people without imagination any change you propose seems at once
impracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the mode
of working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and that
difficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, the
world as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch in
all its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution just
bristles with difficulties--and that the difficulties are met or got
over somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existing
abuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in at
the window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform were
carried," they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such and
such flagrant