There stands the false conservative, anchored to the past.
Whatever is, for him, is right and good. He is constitutionally
opposed to change. Wagon-wheels make a rut an inch deep across
the prairie, but when this man is thirty he is in a rut up to
his eyebrows. When he dies, at seventy, you can truly say, that
his image is truth lying at the bottom of a well. He loves his
father’s house because it is old; he loves old tools; old laws;
old creeds. He stands at his gate, like an angry soldier, waving
his hands and shouting warnings to all who approach. He has
one injunction for every boy starting out to make his fortune:
“Watch your anchor, my son; don’t cast off your moorings”; as
if any Columbus, who spent all his time throwing out anchors,
could ever have crossed the sea! As if any world voyage could
be made by a captain who never dared cast off his moorings! In
the Arabian tale, when the sheik was lost in the desert, he
took off the bridle, and committed the camel to God and his
own instincts, trusting the beast to find its way to the water
springs. But if the old sheik had been a false conservative, he
would first of all have staked the camel down by a lariat, and
then committed himself to God, like these church dignitaries
and councils that stake the religious or political thinker
down by a lariat, which they then label in a humorous moment,
“liberty of thought,” and having made progress impossible, they
commit themselves to the care of the God of progress.--N. D.
HILLIS.
(556)
=Conservatism Natural=--See PROGRESS.