PRESENT CONDITIONS 265 



perial Parliament, there is much more mere oratory, more 

 dialectical defeats and triumphs not in the least relevant 



to the practical business of governing well, than you would 



be able to approve on any private board of directors with 

 less than a tithe of the city's affairs to manage. 



In fact, a private business whose reports read week by 

 week like the discussions in our Town Council would not 

 IDC considered safe by its shareholders. And nothing, my 

 ITord Provost, proyesjso clearly the toughness of the social 

 fibre as the fact that it can stand the strain of our treatment 

 of it. We grumble at the treatment, but we do not 

 earnestly strive to change it. An impartial spectator, 

 looking at our ways, would conclude that, in comparison 

 with our more private affairs, those of the city and the 

 empire concern our welfare in a remote and superficial way. 

 We are relatively very indifferent to them ; and we are 

 indifferent just because we are ignorant, and our social 

 thinking is full of fallacies. 



We are not aware of the magnitude and worth of our 



social inheritance. We have never realized either the 

 difficulty of the process by which our inheritance has been 

 gained, or of the conditions under which alone it can be 

 maintained in its integrity. It is not seen that it is the 



product of the efforts of countless generations of men, 



slowly constructing out of the chaos of ill-regulated desires 



and collidmg_rjurposes both the stable institutions of 



civilization and the temperament which respects them. 



knowing either the nature or the worth of our in- 

 heritance, not realizing either the frailty or the strength of 



th6 forces which bind the social structure together into the 



most complicated and delicate of all the products of human 



nature^we do not care for it as for our most precious pos- 



