184 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



against internal disruption. A state among whose citizens 

 the temper of obedience has been sufficiently developed 

 is nearly certain to outlast a more brilliant but less highly 

 disciplined neighbour. These advantages would, however, 

 be dearly bought by the undue depression of individual 

 initiative. Adaptation, which is of at least equal im 

 portance with resistance, is dependent on the opportune 

 appearance of new ideas, and on the readiness of the masses 

 to accept them ; and when habits of instinctive obedience 

 have made themselves masters in all departments of life, 

 social, political, or religious, the community loses the power 

 either to produce or to import new ideas. Intellectual 

 variation, if it appears at all, is crushed by the prevailing 

 education. There is no reward for originality, and it is 

 discouraged ; it brings the leaders themselves into conflict 

 with the stationary multitudes, and they must either submit 

 to tradition or cease to lead. A community in this con 

 dition might last long, especially if protected by strong 

 natural frontiers, but its fate is certain, and eventually 

 it will provide hewers of wood and drawers of water for 

 some neighbouring state in which individuality has kept 

 on more even terms with obedience. 



There is, therefore, no ground for prophesying that obedi 

 ence will either lose or gain ground in the healthily con 

 stituted state of the future, or that its value, when com 

 pared with that of individuality, will be either greater or 

 less than it is at present. It is likely that the social and the 

 individualist instincts and tendencies will grow equally 

 in strength, and that, side by side with organizations 

 exercising more power over their members than any we 

 know, and spreading into fields from which they are at 

 present excluded, we may find a widely extended sphere 

 for individual initiative. 



