I must mention briefly, before leaving this general topic, an accessory condition on which this internal principle of progress depends for its effectual working. It is necessary that the life of society should be unbroken; that its achievements should be preserved and accumulated from generation to generation. This is provided for in the permanence of records, monuments, and institutions; but these are of less consequence than the _continuity of tradition_. Generations of men do not come into being and pass away like regiments in marching order. There is no present generation; unless one arbitrarily selects those of a certain age to represent the spirit of the day. He who is born now, enters into the midst of a social life in which the present is blended with the past through the interpenetration of individual lives of every stage of maturity. The threads are innumerably many, and their length is but threescore years and ten; but there is no place at which more than a few end, so that they are woven into one continuous and seamless fabric. It does not exceed the facts, then, to say that the life of society is one life, which may gather headway, increase in wealth, and profit by experience. Through this continuity society may learn, as the individual organism does, by the method of trial and error. Costly blunders need not be repeated, and the waste involved {144} in untried experiments may steadily be reduced. Furthermore, the advance is by geometrical, and not merely by arithmetical progression. Every discovery and achievement is multiplied in fruitfulness through being added to the capital stock and reinvested in fresh enterprises. III Human progress, thus determined by the movement of life towards its more rational, that is, more provident, organization, is attended in all its stages with a very significant difference of emphasis. I refer to the old conflict between _conservatism_ and _radicalism_. If this were merely a difference of temperamental bias, it would not need to detain us. But it is really an opposition between exaggerated truths, in which each is boldly and impressively defined. The truth of conservatism lies, first, in its love of the existing order. Every established form of social life has had a certain wholeness and strength and perfection of its own. This is as true of savagery as it is of any type of civilization. Interests are in equilibrium, and are guaranteed security within certain limits that are generally understood. In other words, _at least a measure of fulfilment may be counted on_. The conservative is right in valuing this as a prodigious achievement. He knows that disorder is ruin, not to {145} any class, but to all; the paralysis, if not the absolute destruction, of all fruitful activities.