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This peculiar persistence of social rudiments in all stages of our progress requires some special explanation.

When a given social process, once useful, then useless, then increasingly injurious, continues to force itself upon a growing civilisation, there must be some strong agency to account for it. Naturally, it would have been gradually eliminated by proven undesirability, as cartwheels of solid wood were eliminated. In our material development we have moved steadily on, growing into ever newer and better methods, simplifying, cheapening, quickening, easing, following nature’s methods exactly—the conservation of energy—the line of least resistance. Our American industrial supremacy is attributed to precisely this willingness to grow, to discard the old things, to our constant resort to the scrap-heap. But in social development we seem to have no scrap-heap, or never to use one unless compelled to, making history a sort of sacred junk-shop.

In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.