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 SA NITY IN SO CIA L A GIT A TION 3 4 5

this way, and social progress must, sooner or later, reckon with the mental make-up of the people concerned.

Then, third, as to the need of individual adjustment. Sup- pose we have discovered some facts which make for the solution of the social problem. Suppose enough people are convinced that these methods are in the line of progress to make the change practicable, if the convinced people say so. Is progress then to be expected at once? If men were built on the auto- matic, self-winding, time-lock, hair-trigger plan, yes. But they are not. Some people will jump at a new scheme, simply because it is new, if nobody can get ahead of their impulsiveness and point out objections. But, on the whole, it is decidedly human to let some time pass between our admission that a thing is useful and our decision to use it.

For instance, Tolstoi and Wallace have described the hostil- ity of Russian peasants to modern farming implements. They tell us that, over and over again, after the reaping and threshing machines had proved their capacity, the peasants have waited until the proprietor was out of sight, and then have smashed the innovations. When I was a student in Berlin, sixteen years ago, I got a large amount of free instruction in German by arguing with the barbers about the "clipper." Whenever I seated myself in the barber's chair, I would start the question: "Why do you not use the clipper, as the barbers do in America?" The reply would always be : " O, they are very good things, but — ," and then each would have a different reason for not adopting them. One would say, " It isn't professional ; " another, " They are too expen- sive;" another, "Our customers wouldn't like them," etc., etc. It was only the usual pause before adopting improvements. Last autumn I went to the same shop in the Kaiserhof, and each of the twenty barbers employed had a box that reminded me of a surgeon's case, containing four clippers, besides all the other tools of a barber's outfit. There had to be a gradual personal adjustment, but it came at last and made a reform.

The New England town of 8,000 inhabitants in which I lived for eleven years did not contain a sewer when I first became a taxpayer. For a long time nobody could be made to admit