In each of our forty eight States different codes are showing their
relative advantages; here woman's suffrage is on trial, there the
initiative and referendum, there the recall. Almost every sort of
possible marriage law, it would seem, is being tried somewhere. It
is a time of moral confusion, of the unsettling of old conceptions
and a groping, stumbling progress toward the new.
In such a situation it is no wonder that we have two types of thought,
two sets of forces, at work. On the one hand we have the conservatives,
the "stand-patters," the maintainers of the existing order; on the
other hand are the progressives, the radicals, the reformers of the
existing order. For the former the moral standards of their particular
age and country tend to have an absolute and unconditional worth, which
must not be criticized or questioned. The necessity of allegiance to
morality has been so deeply stamped upon their minds that it has become
a loyalty to the particular brand of morality they have grown up in,
however flagrantly inadequate or tyrannous it may be. For the latter
a commendable impatience with the imperfect is apt to foster a blindness
to the value that almost always lies in ancient customs and a lack
of regard for the need of stability and common agreement on some plane.
These iconoclasts, vociferous in condemnation, are often most empty
handed, giving us nothing wiser or more advantageous wherewith to
replace the conventions they discard.
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