only a temporary value, rather than leave them littering about for no purpose except to cause annoyance and excite contempt; but we preserve and restore that which, by the exercise of a little care, can be made to have a permanent value and do our parents credit. In the same spirit we should deal with all the work of the past. Our old languages, old customs, old modes of religious observance, are often all that remain to tell us about serious, studious, devout men of long ago. It is easy to forsake old customs for the sake of following new fashions; but the consequence is, that hardly anything then will remain to tell our grandchildren what sort of people their ancestors were. And again, we should try to remember that comparatively little harm is done by the mere mistakes of individuals; all the most grievous mischief is caused by that massing of error which we call "fashion"; the unreasoning copying of what somebody else does without reflecting whether it is a suitable thing for us to do. Doing something new because somebody else did it, is not progress. Imitation without reason is the property of monkeys, not of men. Nothing is more dangerous to social order than the habit of imitating at random unselected examples. A thing may be very real progress when some one person does it for a reason; and the very same thing may be anything but progress if somebody else does it without a reason. We teach little children by imitation, but that is because they are children, because their reasoning powers are dormant. So we let a baby crawl on all fours till it can walk. But then a child has parents, who select what example they choose to put before its eyes, and who protect it from crawling
