Just as, in the case of individuals, any significant achievements require persistent convergence of means toward a definite end, so is it in the case of social groups. No great business organizations are built up through continual variations of policy. Similarly, in the building up of a university, a government department, a state, or a social order, consecutive and disciplined persistence in established ways is a requisite of progress. Without such continuous organization of efforts toward fixed goals, action becomes frivolous and fragmentary, a wind along a waste. The history of the English people has elicited the admiration of philosophers and historians because it has been such a gradual and deliberate movement, such a measured and certain progress toward political and social freedom. To those who appreciate the value of unity of action, of the assured fruits of cumulative and consistent action along a given path, change as such seems fraught with danger. Nor is it specific dangers they fear so much as the loss of moral fiber, the scattering of energies, the waste and futility that are frequently the net result of casual driftings with every wind that blows. No one has more eloquently expressed this view than Edmund Burke in his _Reflections on the French Revolution:_ But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation--and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would be little better than the flies of a summer. * * * * * To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions, but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.[1] [Footnote 1: Edmund Burke: _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (George Bell & Sons, 1888), pp. 366-68.]