The life of a radical in the old days was hard and dangerous. He was rarely successful and tended more often to wind up badly— he was jailed, run out of town, laughed at, or, worst of all, ignored. But in modern times we have changed all that. We listen, which may be the root of the problem, and we adopt the scheme in question at once, however harebrained. The theme is “instant acceptance.” It happens steadily. Just the other day it was pants for women, and then long hair for men. One minute little Willie had a shaggy head and a wisp of a new beard, and within six months even old men were hiding their ears behind large, fluffy sideburns and their collars under gray pageboys. Somebody suggested that Ms. would be a fine form of address for the liberated woman who does not want to reveal what used to be called her “condition” as either spinster or married woman. Now mail floods into this office addressing as Ms. a great many women who previously saw no objection to being either Miss or Mrs. The surrender outruns the attack.

Much the same thing can be found daily in anyone’s morning paper. Homosexuals demonstrate, just as though they were Teamsters, or Italian-Americans, or welfare recipients, and the Establishment falls on its knees. And so Yale gets an officially recognized Gay Alliance, probably next door to Skull and Bones, and no skeletons are hidden. A similar corporal’s guard of liberated women, or militant blacks, or rioting students can produce the same effect. Businessmen crumble, city councillors tremble, faculties cave in. Those who resist are denounced; the New York Times recently called one group of holdouts “self-appointed upholders of ‘the old virtues’ ” (which leads one to wonder, disloyally, who appointed the New York Times , and to what).

It is a great time, one has to admit, to be on the bandwagon of radical change, and it is obvious that nothing—old virtue, old idea, even old landmark—is going to escape. With thoughts like these in mind, we picked up a recent issue of Preservation News , the esteemed publication of The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which devotes itself to fighting the battle against the bulldozer and the builder. The Trust, which is one of the few remaining American organizations with a bit of backbone left, reproduces the little picture shown here, depicting Faneuil Hall, one of the birthplaces of our liberty, as it will look when an enormous forty-four-story office building is completed beside it. There’s radical change for you. Since one other big building has already been erected behind it, and Boston’s hideous new City Hall has gone up across the square (far right), the old hall will be effectively hemmed in. Boston has asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ( HUD ) to approve the new