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The variety of the British does not end with nationalities. There are Yorkshiremen and men from Somerset, Cornishmen and people of Durham who differ as much as Texans and Vermonters did in the days before the doubtful blessings of standardization overtook our society.

Here we encounter the first of many paradoxes we shall meet in this book. Homogeneity in political thought—basic political thought that is not party allegiance—seems far greater in Britain than in France or the United States. Yet, until the present, the resistance to standardization has been much more stubborn. Institutions and customs survive without undue prodding by Societies for the Preservation of This and That, although there are plenty of the latter nesting in British society.

Early in 1954 I was in Inverasdale, roughly five hundred miles north-west of London on the western coast of Scotland. Inverasdale is a small village buffeted by the fierce winds that beat in from the North Atlantic, and its people are independent and God-fearing. John Rollo, a Scots industrialist, had started a small factory in Inverasdale to hold the people in the Highlands, where the population has fallen steadily for a century.