by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer
alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it
thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not',
the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail to
endanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or a
trade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conforms
to opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his own
judgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own,
and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best.

Wide uniformities of conduct and of material culture may therefore
result from ignorance, no less than from knowledge, and unless we have
very full acquaintance with the region and external conditions, it is
not easy to decide whether any one of these uniformities is wisely
uniform or not. The record of the dealings of quite well-meaning
conquerors with the institutions and arts of their subjects is full of
tragedies of this kind. I call to mind an example in Paraguay, where
abstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearly
wrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at once
began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the
committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to
the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was
averted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to
indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go on
living, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So with
devotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration of
wide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundings which make up
the Home of Man. Were Nature uniform, in a geographical sense, from pole
to pole, civilization might be practically as well as ideally one,
though it may fairly be doubted whether in such a world civilization,