When any desire is denied for the sake of another, the approved and accepted activity takes on additional value; it is coveted and pursued all the more for what it has cost. Thus the spectacle of other people enjoying both activities without difficulty, thanks to some not very obvious adjustment, is peculiarly distressing, and such people are usually regarded as especially depraved. In different circumstances this view may or may not be justified. The element of sacrifice exacted by any stable system explains to a large extent the tenacity with which custom is clung to, the intolerance directed sea innovations, the fanaticism of converts, the hypocrisy of teachers, and many other lamentable phenomena of the moral attitudes. However much an individual may privately find his personality varying from hour to hour, he is compelled to join in maintaining a public facade of some rigidity and buttressed with every contrivance which can be invented. The Wills of Gods, the Conscience, the Catechism, Taboos, Immediate Intuitions, Penal Laws, Public Opinion, Good Form, are all more or less ingenious and efficient devices with the same aim—to secure the uniformity which social life requires. By their means and by Custom, Convention, and Superstition, the underlying basis of morality, the effort to attain maximum satisfaction through coherent systematisation, is a veiled and disguised to an extraordinary degree. Whence arise great difficulties and many disasters. It is so necessary and so difficult to secure a stable and general system of public behaviour that any means whatever are justifiable, failing the discovery of better. All societies hitherto achieved, however, involve waste and misery of appalling extent. Any public code of behaviour must, it is generally agreed, represent a cruder and more costly systematisation than those attained to by many of the individuals who live under the code, a point obviously to be remembered in connection with censorship problems. Customs change more slowly than conditions, and every change in conditions brings with it new possibilities of systematisation. None of the afflictions of humanity are worse than its obsolete moral principles. Consider the effects of the obsolete virtues of nationalism under modern conditions, or the absurdity of the religious attitude to birth control. The present lack of plasticity in such things involves a growing danger. Human conditions and possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality. The view that what we need in this tempestuous turmoil of change is a Rock to shelter under or to cling to, pane than an efficient aeroplane in which to ride it, is comprehensible but mistaken.