And then, as we have said, one must remember the stuff of which life is made. One must consider what an overwhelming preponderance of the most tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be absorbed between material cares and the solicitude of the affections. It is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one's time, because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs, and slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it. Men and women have to live. The task for most of them is arduous enough to make them well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as they find in the use and wont of daily existence. To insist on a whole community being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new ideas, which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative intelligence of the time,--this, even if it were a possible process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social dissolution. 'It cannot be too emphatically asserted,' as has been said by one of the most influential of modern thinkers, 'that this policy of compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs, which especially characterises English life, is a policy essential to a society going through the transitions caused by continued growth and development. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social state, but incongruous with the new social state that has grown out of it, surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with these new ideas and institutions--necessarily furnish elements of contradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as for the carrying on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a normal development.'[27]