Here our account of the disposition to be conservative and its current fortunes might be expected to end, with
the man in whom this disposition is strong last seen swimming against the tide, disregarded not because what
he has to say is necessarily false but because it has become irrelevant; outmaneuvered, not on account of any
intrinsic demerit but merely by the flow of circumstance; a faded, timid, nostalgic character, provoking pity as an
outcast and contempt as a reactionary. Nevertheless, I think there is something more to be said. Even in these
circumstances, when a conservative disposition in respect of things in general is unmistakably at a discount,
there are occasions when this disposition remains not only appropriate, but supremely so; and there are
connections in which we are unavoidably disposed in a conservative direction.