It would mean too much loss of time, too
much loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice of existing
co-operations.
New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting upon
their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful
wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where
movement is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae
unyielding and unadaptable because they are unthinking. In England, for
example, in the last century, where social conditions have been
comparatively stable, discussion good and abundant and internal
migration small, there have been far fewer such developments than in the
United States of America. In England toleration has become an
institution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop and Infidel, can all
meet at the same dinner-table and spend an agreeable week-end together,
there is no need for defensive segregations. In such an atmosphere
opinion and usage change and change continually, not dramatically as the
results of separations and pitched battles but continuously and fluently
as the outcome of innumerable personal reactions.
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