This suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three causes.
Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of change tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.
Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions, or being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost unparalleled dissimilarity has today arisen between the different individuals composing our societies; where, side by side with men and women who have rapidly adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt themselves to the new conditions of knowledge and new conditions of life, that, were they to reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated societies, they might perhaps hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be found men and women whose social, religious, and moral ideals would not constitute them out of harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the remote forbears of the human race; while, between these extreme classes lies that large mass of persons in an intermediate state of development.
This diversity is bound to cause friction and suffering in the interactions of the members of our societies; more especially, as the individuals composing each type are not sorted out into classes and families, but are found scattered through all classes and grades in our societies.

(One of the women holding the most advanced and modern view of the relation of woman to life whom we have met was the wife of a Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her living by the sewing of the uppers of men's boots.) Persons bound by the closest ties of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual intercourse, are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of adaptation to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction and consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray it in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium of art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting on each other--as in the novel or the drama.

We are like a company of chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box, and jumbled side by side.

In the stationary societies, where all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and undesirable, in all branches of human life.

(Only those who have been thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such as that of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with Europeans; or such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty years ago, can realise adequately how wholly free from moral and social problems and social friction such a society can be.