The immediate application of this theory to politics is obvious. If true, it gives a scientific explanation and justification of change and development. It is impossible at the present day for any political thinkers to do what Sir Henry Maine did at the beginning of the Imperialist reaction, and speak of change as a phenomenon peculiar to Western Europe and of a stationary condition as the general rule.[342] Events of recent years in Japan, China, India, Persia, Turkey, and Egypt have exposed the false basis of his reasoning. But even without this experience, a post-Darwinian politician would point to the changelessness of the East as in itself a sign of degeneracy, and the restlessness of the West as a proof of its superiority. Life is identified with change. Movement is normal, activity the universal rule of health. The peoples who stagnate, decay; and the one test of vitality is the capacity to receive and to apply new ideas. The primeval mollusc indeed saved itself from injury by its protective shell, and its descendants are molluscs to this day. The organisms which, consciously or unconsciously, preferred mobility and risk to immobility and perfect safety, have evolved, through countless intervening steps, to man. The modern outburst of reforming zeal is thus not spasmodic, but only an acceleration of an eternal process of development. The old Toryism is dead and damned. The maintenance of the old, without inquiry and without readjustment, is the upsetting of the natural order. The prospect of change has lost its terrors. What we fear to-day is not change, but permanence; or rather, we seek for permanence in a line of change. The evolutionary philosophy has thus come directly to the aid of Liberalism, and some reformers, particularly a certain school of Socialists, apply it mechanically to the growth of {312} society, as from home industry to factory industry, from factory industry to the Trust, and from the Trust to the national organization of production. But most advocates of change are more cautious, and are content to find in it a defence of the need or the harmlessness of change. On the other hand, it has moderated the reforming temper. No Liberal of any capacity of mind can now rush to the cutting and carving of society with the cheerful zeal of Paine or Bentham. There can be for him no cutting off and beginning afresh. The historical caution which distinguishes Mill from Bentham must now be emphasized in his successors. Reform must be a process of training and adaptation, not of destruction and substitution. Logic must be applied with circumspection, and if the statesman has now a more certain hope that the people will ultimately achieve happiness, he is no less sure that they can never be dragged into it by the hair of the head.