But here we run against another guiding principle of many people. It is often assumed that possibly in government, probably in religion, and certainly in morals, there is an absolute standard of right and wrong, immutable and irremovable. To take the last subject—that of morals—to the utilitarian they are the conditions for the well-being of society, and may vary indefinitely with the variations of society, and he recognises that there is perhaps no action which may not belong to the best code of morality for certain possible conditions. To the theologian morals are the Divine dictates, which have varied immensely under different dispensations; and the Patriarchal, early Jewish, Prophetic, or Christian codes are represented as quite incompatible one with another. The subjects of sister-marriage, concubinage of captives, lapidation, private revenge, communal or individual responsibility, and others, all show how entirely variable the presentation of the moral standard is for different states of society. Hence we must always regard any given moral standard as being rightly associated with some particular condition of society and typical of it; much as the colour of red heat, or yellow heat, or white heat, is typical of particular temperatures. And instead of blindly reprobating those among us who do not conform to our present theoretical standard, or even the present normal standard, we should regard them as fragments of a different society gone astray in time or space. Thus we see that diversity should be tolerated up to the limits of the laws that are absolutely necessary to avoid confusion and misunderstanding between members of the same community: and there is no constraining principle which would narrow the variability allowable, short of permitting injustice, hardship, or unfair competition between those who need to work together in mutual confidence and good faith. It may truly be said that civilisation is the means for giving scope to diversity. Under stagnant and uniform conditions there may be a fossilised form of civilisation; but any living form must yield opportunities for individual effort, and every such opportunity is the making or marring of the man who rises to it or who falls before it. The leading tenth and the submerged tenth are equally the proof that a living civilisation is doing its work of sorting out the best and getting rid of the worst stock.