As he sat down, Michael rose again. He spoke encouragingly to the girl and then introduced her. It had, he said, been one of our greatest worries that we had no one among us with medical knowledge; therefore it was with great relief that he welcomed Miss Berr. It was true that she did not hold medical degrees with impressive letters, but she did have high nursing qualifications. For himself, he thought that knowledge recently attained might be worth more than degrees acquired years ago.
The girl, blushing again, said a little piece about her determination to carry the job through, and ended a trifle abruptly with the information that she would inoculate us all against a variety of things before we left the hall.
A small, sparrowlike man whose name I did not catch rubbed it in that the health of each was the concern of all, and that any suspicion of illness should be reported at once, since the effects of a contagious disease among us would be serious.
When he had finished, Sandra rose and introduced the last speaker of the group: Dr. E. H. Vorless, D.Sc., of Edinburgh, professor of sociology at the University of Kingston.
The white-haired man walked to the desk. He stood there a few moments with his finger tips resting upon it and his head bent down as if he were studying it. Those behind regarded him carefully, with a trace of anxiety. The Colonel leaned over to whisper something to Michael, who nodded without taking his eyes off the doctor. The old man looked up. He passed a hand over his hair.
“My friends,” he said, “I think I may claim to be the oldest among you. In nearly seventy years I have learned, and had to unlearn, many things—though not nearly so many as I could have wished. But if, in the course of a long study of man’s institutions, one thing has struck me more than their stubbornness, it is their variety.
“Well, indeed do the French say autres temps, autres m?urs. We must all see, if we pause to think, that one kind of community’s virtue may well be another kind of community’s crime; that what is frowned upon here may be considered laudable elsewhere; that customs condemned in one century are condoned in another. And we must also see that in each community and each period there is a widespread belief in the moral rightness of its own customs.
“Now, clearly, since many of these beliefs conflict, they cannot all be ‘right’ in an absolute sense. The most judgment one can pass on them—if one has to pass judgments at all—is to say that they have at some period been ‘right’ for those communities that hold them. It may be that they still are, but it frequently is found that they are not, and that the communities who continue to follow them blindly without heed to changed circumstances do so to their own disadvantage—perhaps to their ultimate destruction.”
The audience did not perceive where this introduction might be leading. It fidgeted. Most of it was accustomed, when it encountered this kind of thing, to turn the radio off at once. Now it felt trapped. The speaker decided to make himself clearer.
“Thus,” he continued, “you would not expect to find the same manners, customs, and forms in a penurious Indian village living on the edge of starvation as you would in, say, Mayfair. Similarly, the people in a warm country, where life is easy, are going to differ quite a deal from the people of an overcrowded, hard-working country as to the nature of the principle virtues. In other words, different environments set different standards.
“I point this out to you because the world we knew is gone—finished.
“The conditions which framed and taught us our standards have gone with it. Our needs are now different, and our aims must be different. If you want an example, I would point out to you that we have all spent the day indulging with perfectly easy consciences in what two days ago would have been housebreaking and theft. With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start building again; we have to start thinking again—which is much more difficult, and far more distasteful.
“Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree. But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of its young in a mold, introducing a binding agent of prejudice. The result is a remarkably tough substance capable of withstanding successfully even the pressure of many innate tendencies and instincts. In this way it has been possible to produce a man who against all his basic sense of self-preservation will voluntarily risk death for an ideal—but also in this way is produced the dolt who is sure of everything and knows what is ‘right.’