‘WE are running’ explained an elephant with dignity ‘because the world is crumbling.’ ‘Really?’ said the lion, surprised. ‘Where did you see this, elephant?’ The elephant admitted that he had it from a fox. ‘Ask the deer’ said the fox hastily. ‘The rabbits told us’ said the deer. Then the rabbits began nudging one another and whispering, until one said in a frightened squeak, ‘I heard it begin, I heard the sound of the earth crumbling by the wood-apple tree!’
‘Let us go and look’ said the lion soberly. So with some misgivings the rabbit rode on his golden back all the way to the tree, where the shattered wood-apple was still lying on the sunbaked ground. ‘That is what you heard, you foolish rabbit’ said the lion, and padded back to tell the others that the world was not crumbling after all. And they believed the wise King of Beasts, or they might all be running still.*
Addressing students at the Royal College of Music in 1918, Sir C. H. Parry spoke about two kinds of mistake: the good kind, mistakes we make when we are taking personal initiative, and the bad kind, “that unfortunate herding instinct of the race which makes people take their cues from one another, and lean up against one another, and do stupid things because so many other stupid people do them.” See Mistakes, Right and Wrong.