Page:The vested interests and the state of the industrial arts - ("the modern point of view and the new order") (IA vestedinterestss00vebliala).pdf/28

16 in the last analysis and with due allowance for a margin of tolerance it is the frame of mind of the common man that makes the foundation of society in the modern world; even though the elder statesmen continue to direct its motions from day to day by the light of those principles that were found good some time before yesterday. And the fortunes of the civilised world, for good or ill, have come to turn on the deeds of commission and of omission of these advanced peoples among whom the frame of mind of the common man is the finally conditioning circumstance in what may safely be done or left undone. The advice and consent of the common run has latterly come to be indispensable to the conduct of affairs among civilised men, somewhat in the same degree in which the community is to be accounted a civilised people. It is indispensable at least in a permissive way, at least to the extent that no line of policy can long be pursued successfully without the permissive tolerance of the common run; and the margin of tolerance in the case appears to be narrower the more alert and the more matter-of-fact the frame of mind of the common man.