adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt themselves to the new
conditions of knowledge and new conditions of life, that, were they to
reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated societies, they might perhaps
hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be found men and women whose
social, religious, and moral ideals would not constitute them out of
harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the remote forbears of the
human race; while, between these extreme classes lies that large mass of
persons in an intermediate state of development. This diversity is bound
to cause friction and suffering in the interactions of the members of our
societies; more especially, as the individuals composing each type are not
sorted out into classes and families, but are found scattered through all
classes and grades in our societies. (One of the women holding the most
advanced and modern view of the relation of woman to life whom we have met
was the wife of a Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her
living by the sewing of the uppers of men's boots.) Persons bound by the
closest ties of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual
intercourse, are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of
adaptation to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction
and consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and
almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray it
in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium of
art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting on
each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of chess-
men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together,
and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box,
and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where all
individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and
social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed
traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had
of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be