Thirdly, the problem may be shirked by the easy mechanism of rationalization. The man may take his forbidden pleasure and endow a chapel, persuading himself that his is a special case, that at any rate he is not as bad as X, or Y, or Z, who {53} committed such and such enormities, that after all there is Divine mercy, and he never beat his wife, and was always regular with his subscriptions to missions and the hospitals. Or, if his difficulty is the ethical one, he will come to see how right the herd view really is; that it is a very narrow mind which cannot see the intrinsic excellence of suffering; that the sheep and cattle we breed for eating, the calf we bleed to death that its meat may be white, the one baby out of four we kill in the first year of life, that cancer, consumption, and insanity and the growing river of blood which bathes the feet of advancing mankind, all have their part in the Increasing Purpose which is leading the race ever upwards and onwards to a Divine consummation of joy. Thus the conflict ceases, and the man is content to watch the blood and the Purpose go on increasing together and to put on flesh unperplexed by the shallow and querulous scruples of his youth. Of these three solutions that of scepticism is unquestionably the least common, though the impression that this is not the case is created by the frequency of apparent scepticism, which, in fact, merely masks the continuation of conflict in the deeper strata of the mind. A man the subject of such submerged conflict, though he may appear to others, and, of course, to himself, to have reached a secure and uncontested basis of stability, may, after a period of apparently frictionless mental life, betray by unmistakable evidence the fact that conflict has continued disastrously below the surface. The solutions by indifference and by rationalization or by a mixture of these two processes are characteristic of the great class of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State. In {54} them herd suggestion shows its capacity to triumph over experience, to delay the evolution of altruism, and to obscure the existence and falsify the results of the contest between personal and social desires. That it is able to do so has the advantage of establishing existing society with great firmness, but it has also the consequence of entrusting the conduct of the State and the attitude of it towards life to a class which their very stability shows to possess a certain relative incapacity to take experience seriously, a certain relative insensibility to the value of feeling and to suffering, and a decided preference for herd tradition over all other sources of conduct.