China.
The reader perhaps remembers how eloquently Sir Henry Maine described the dislike to change which is inherent in large bodies of mankind. “Vast populations, some of them with a civilisation considerable but peculiar, detest that which in the west would be called reform. The entire Mohammedan world detests it. The multitude of coloured men who swarm in the great continent of Africa detest it, and it is detested by that large part of mankind which we are accustomed to leave on one side as barbarous or savage. The millions upon millions of men who fill the Chinese empire loathe it and (what is more) despise it.... There is not the shadow of a doubt that the enormous mass of the Indian population hates and dreads change, as is natural in the parts of a body-social solidified by caste.”[29]
Modern Character of the Enthusiasm for Change.
Sir Henry Maine afterwards pointed out that the enthusiasm for change was not only comparatively rare but also extremely modern. “It is known but to a small part of mankind, and to that part but for a short period during a history of incalculable length. It is not older than the free employment of legislation by popular governments.”
Universal Conservatism of Women.
The intention of the passages quoted is to depreciate the love of reform in modern life, and is therefore unfriendly to popular government as we know it, but this unfriendly intention does not deprive the quotations of their truth. All that, and much more written by the same author on that subject, is strictly true. He went on to point to the intense and universal conservatism of women, “in all communities the strictest conservators of usage and the sternest censors of departure from accepted rules of morals, manners, and fashions.”
Rarity of the Reforming Impulses.
This constant strength of conservative instinct is not counterbalanced by any equivalent reforming instinct. It is not our hereditary habit of mind that leads us to reform, but our occasional fits of reasoning and of intellectual unrest.
French Tendency to a Democratic Conservatism.
My belief about the French is that their real tendency is decidedly not revolutionary but towards a democratic conservatism, and that they move towards this end by gradually including first one thing and then another in the catalogue of fixed usages.