perhaps before man existed, and then to have stopped—­stopped dead, as we say.  But mankind has never stopped.  If a country’s progress is arrested—­if a people becomes simply conservative in habits, they may die slowly, like Egypt, or quickly, likes Sparta, but they die and disappear, unless inspired by new life, like Japan, or by revolution, like France and possibly Russia.  For, as we are almost too frequently told, change is the law of human life.

And may not this be just the very reason we are seeking for—­the very reason why all the world loves a rebel, at a distance?  Perhaps the world unconsciously recognises in him a symbol of change, a symbol of the law of life.  We may not like him very near us—­not uncomfortably near, as we say.  For most change is uncomfortable.  When I was shut up for many weeks in a London hospital, I felt a shrinking horror of going out, as though my skin had become too tender for this rough world.  After I had been shut up for four months in a siege, daily exposed to shells, bullets, fever, and starvation, I felt no relief when the relief came, but rather a dread of confronting the perils of ordinary life.  So quickly does the curse of stagnation fall upon us.  And in support of stagnation are always ranged the immense forces of Society, the prosperous, the well-to-do, the people who are content if to-morrow is exactly like to-day.  In support of stagnation stands the power of every kind of government—­the King who sticks to his inherited importance, the Lords who stick to their lands and titles, the experts who stick to their theories, the officials who stick to their incomes, routine, and leisure, the Members of Parliament who stick to their seats.

But even more powerful than all these forces in support of stagnation is the enormous host of those whose first thought is necessarily their daily bread—­men and women who dare not risk a change for fear of to-morrow’s hunger—­people for whom the crust is too uncertain for its certainty to be questioned.  We often ask why it is that the poor—­the working-people—­endure their poverty and perpetual toil without overwhelming revolt.  The reason is that they have their eyes fixed on the evening meal, and for the life of them they dare not lose sight of it.

So the rebel need never be afraid of going too fast.  The violence of inertia—­the suction of the stagnant bog—­is almost invincible.  Like the horse, we are creatures of cast-iron habit.  We abandon ourselves easily to careless acquiescence.  We make much of external laws, and, like a mother bemused with torpid beer when she overlays her child, we stifle the law of the soul because its crying is such a nuisance.  Like a new baby, a new thought is fractious, restless, and incalculable.  It saps our strength; it gives us no peace; it exposes a wider surface to pain.  There is something indecent, uncontrolled, and unconscionable about it.  Our friends like it best when it is asleep, and they like us better when it is buried.