disposition of all peoples, white, black, or brown, a natural
disposition that education seeks to destroy, is to insist upon
uniformity, to make publicity extremely unsympathetic to even the
most harmless departures from the code. To be dressed "odd," to
behave "oddly," to eat in a different manner or of different food,
to commit, indeed, any breach of the established convention is to
give offence and to incur hostility among unsophisticated men. But
the disposition of the more original and enterprising minds at all
times has been to make such innovations.

This is particularly in evidence in this present age. The almost
cataclysmal development of new machinery, the discovery of new
materials, and the appearance of new social possibilities through
the organised pursuit of material science, has given enormous and
unprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local
order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the
earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are
afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and still
tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local
orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements
and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important small
things of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in the
things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixed
discordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wide
culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no
wider understanding has yet replaced them. And so publicity in the
modern earth has become confusedly unsympathetic for everyone.
Classes are intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact
provokes aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts,
and the subtler people are excessively tormented by a sense of