progress. And of all the three it
is infinitely the hardest to express. Perhaps it might be put thus:
that we need watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall from Utopia
as we fell from Eden.

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive
is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real
reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend
to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best
argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument
against being conservative. The conservative theory would really
be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact.
But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave
things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not.
If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you
particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again;
that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you
want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this
which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and
terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance
is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity
with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing
romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies.
But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies;
under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty
years before. Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic
monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards)
went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First.
So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just
after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored.
The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined.
So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical
manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people,
until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant
eating the people like bread. So again, we have almost up to the
last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion.
Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start)
that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature
of the case, the hobbies o