CHAPTER V.

THE REALISATION OF OPINION.

A person who takes the trouble to form his own opinions and beliefs will

feel that he owes no responsibility to the majority for his conclusions.

If he is a genuine lover of truth, if he is inspired by the divine

passion for seeing things as they are, and a divine abhorrence of

holding ideas which do not conform to the facts, he will be wholly

independent of the approval or assent of the persons around him. When he

proceeds to apply his beliefs in the practical conduct of life, the

position is different. There are now good reasons why his attitude

should be in some ways less inflexible. The society in which he is

placed is a very ancient and composite growth. The people from whom he

dissents have not come by their opinions, customs, and institutions by a

process of mere haphazard. These opinions and customs all had their

origin in a certain real or supposed fitness. They have a certain depth

of root in the lives of a proportion of the existing generation. Their

fitness for satisfying human needs may have vanished, and their

congruity with one another may have come to an end. That is only one

side of the truth. The most zealous propagandism cannot penetrate to

them. The quality of bearing to be transplanted from one kind of soil

and climate to another is not very common, and it is far from being

inexhaustible even where it exists.

In common language we speak of a generation as something possessed of a

kind of exact unity, with all its parts and members one and homogeneous.

Yet very plainly it is not this. It is a whole, but a whole in a state

of constant flux. Its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It is

not one, but many generations. Each of the seven ages of man is

neighbour to all the rest. The column of the veterans is already

staggering over into the last abyss, while the column of the newest

recruits is forming with all its nameless and uncounted hopes. To each

its tradition, its tendency, its possibilities. Only a proportion of

each in one society can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of a new

truth, and endurance enough to bear it along rugged and untrodden ways.

And then, as we have said, one must remember the stuff of which life is

made. One must consider what an overwhelming preponderance of the most

tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be

absorbed between material cares and the solicitude of the affections. It

is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one's time,

because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs, and

slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it.

Men and women have to live. The task for most of them is arduous enough

to make them well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as they find

in the use and wont of daily existence. To insist on a whole community

being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new

ideas, which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced

speculative intelligence of the time,--this, even if it were a possible

process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social

dissolution.

'It cannot be too emphatically asserted,' as has been said by one of

the most influential of modern thinkers, 'that this policy of

compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs, which

especially characterises English life, is a policy essential to a

society going through the transitions caused by continued growth and

development. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social state, but

incongruous with the new social state that has grown out of it,

surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and

disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and

institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with

these new ideas and institutions--necessarily furnish elements of

contradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as for the carrying

on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not

ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a

normal development.'[27]

Yet we must not press this argument, and the state of feeling that

belongs to it, further than they may be fairly made to go. The danger in

most natures lies on this side, for on this side our love of ease

works, and our prejudices. The writer in the passage we have just quoted

is describing compromise as a natural state of things, the resultant of

divergent forces. He is not professing to define its conditions or

limits as a practical duty. Nor is there anything in his words, or in

the doctrine of social evolution of which he is the most elaborate and

systematic expounder, to favour that deliberate sacrifice of truth,

either in search or in expression, against which our two previous

chapters were meant to protest.[28] When Mr. Spencer talks of a new

social state establishing its own ideas, of course he means, and can

only mean, that men and women establish their own ideas, and to do that,

it is obvious that they must at one time or another have conceived them

without any special friendliness of reference to the old ideas, which

they were in the fulness of time to supersede. Still less, of course,

can a new social state ever establish its ideas, unless the persons who

hold them confess them openly, and give to them an honest and effective

adherence.

Every discussion of the more fundamental principles of conduct must

contain, expressly or by implication, some general theory of the nature

and constitution of the social union. Let us state in a few words that

which seems to command the greatest amount both of direct and analogical

evidence in our time. It is perhaps all the more important to discuss

our subject with immediate and express reference to this theory, because

it has become in some minds a plea for a kind of philosophic

indifference towards any policy of Thorough, as well as an excuse for

systematic abstention from vigorous and downright courses of action.

A progressive society is now constantly and justly compared to a growing

organism. Its vitality in this aspect consists of a series of changes in

ideas and institutions. These changes arise spontaneously from the

operation of the whole body of social conditions, external and

internal. The understanding and the affections and desires are always

acting on the domestic, political, and economic ordering. They influence

the religious sentiment. They touch relations with societies outside. In

turn they are constantly being acted on by all these elements. In a

society progressing in a normal and uninterrupted course, this play and

interaction is the sign and essence of life. It is, as we are so often

told, a long process of new adaptations and re-adaptations; of the

modification of tradition and usage by truer ideas and improved

institutions. There may be, and there are, epochs of rest, when this

modification in its active and demonstrative shape slackens or ceases to

be visible. But even then the modifying forces are only latent. Further

progress depends on the revival of their energy, before there has been

time for the social structure to become ossified and inelastic. The

history of civilisation is the history of the displacement of old

conceptions by new ones more conformable to the facts. It is the record

of the removal of old institutions and ways of living, in favour of

others of greater convenience and ampler capacity, at once multiplying

and satisfying human requirements.

Now compromise, in view of the foregoing theory of social advance, may

be of two kinds, and of these two kinds one is legitimate and the other

not. It may stand for two distinct attitudes of mind, one of them

obstructive and the other not. It may mean the deliberate suppression or

mutilation of an idea, in order to make it congruous with the

traditional idea or the current prejudice on the given subject, whatever

that may be. Or else it may mean a rational acquiescence in the fact

that the bulk of your contemporaries are not yet prepared either to

embrace the new idea, or to change their ways of living in conformity to

it. In the one case, the compromiser rejects the highest truth, or

dissembles his own acceptance of it. In the other, he holds it

courageously for his ensign and device, but neither forces nor expects

the whole world straightway to follow. The first prolongs the duration

of the empire of prejudice, and retards the arrival of improvement. The

second does his best to abbreviate the one, and to hasten and make

definite the other, yet he does not insist on hurrying changes which,

to be effective, would require the active support of numbers of persons

not yet ripe for them. It is legitimate compromise to say:--'I do not

expect you to execute this improvement, or to surrender that prejudice,

in my time. But at any rate it shall not be my fault if the improvement

remains unknown or rejected. There shall be one man at least who has

surrendered the prejudice, and who does not hide that fact.' It is

illegitimate compromise to say:--'I cannot persuade you to accept my

truth; therefore I will pretend to accept your falsehood.'

That this distinction is as sound on the evolutional theory of society

as on any other is quite evident. It would be odd if the theory which

makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify.

When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and

institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one

means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human

effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the

society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as

indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so.

Progress depends upon tendencies and forces in a community. But of these

tendencies and forces, the organs and representatives must plainly be

found among the men and women of the community, and cannot possibly be

found anywhere else. Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we

were all to be cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation,

we should awake to find ourselves in a greatly improved social state.

The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it

does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right

steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a

cause, but a law. It explains the source, and marks the immovable

limitations, of social energy. But social energy itself can never be

superseded either by evolution or by anything else.

The reproach of being impracticable and artificial attaches by rights

not to those who insist on resolute, persistent, and uncompromising

efforts to remove abuses, but to a very different class--to those,

namely, who are credulous enough to suppose that abuses and bad customs

and wasteful ways of doing things will remove themselves. This

credulity, which is a cloak for indolence or ignorance or stupidity,

overlooks the fact that there are bodies of men, more or less numerous,

attached by every selfish interest they have to the maintenance of these

abusive customs. 'A plan,' says Bentham, 'may be said to be too good to

be practicable, where, without adequate inducement in the shape of

personal interest, it requires for its accomplishment that some

individual or class of individuals shall have made a sacrifice of his or

their personal interest to the interest of the whole. When it is on the

part of a body of men or a multitude of individuals taken at random that

any such sacrifice is reckoned upon, then it is that in speaking of the

plan the term _Utopian_ may without impropriety be applied.' And this is

the very kind of sacrifice which must be anticipated by those who so

misunderstand the doctrine of evolution as to believe that the world is

improved by some mystic and self-acting social discipline, which

dispenses with the necessity of pertinacious attack upon institutions

that have outlived their time, and interests that have lost their

justification.

We are thus brought to the position--to which, indeed, bare observation

of actual occurrences might well bring us, if it were not for the

clouding disturbances of selfishness, or of a true philosophy of society

wrongly applied--that a society can only pursue its normal course by

means of a certain progression of changes, and that these changes can

only be initiated by individuals or very small groups of individuals.

The progressive tendency can only be a tendency, it can only work its

way through the inevitable obstructions around it, by means of persons

who are possessed by the special progressive idea. Such ideas do not

spring up uncaused and unconditioned in vacant space. They have had a

definite origin and ordered antecedents. They are in direct relation

with the past. They present themselves to one person or little group of

persons rather than to another, because circumstances, or the accident

of a superior faculty of penetration, have placed the person or group in

the way of such ideas. In matters of social improvement the most common

reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that

the one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the

unimproved practice. Or he is one of those rare intelligences, active,

alert, inventive, which by constitution or training find their chief

happiness in thinking in a disciplined and serious manner how things can

be better done. In all cases the possession of a new idea, whether

practical or speculative, only raises into definite speech what others

have needed without being able to make their need articulate. This is

the principle on which experience shows us that fame and popularity are

distributed. A man does not become celebrated in proportion to his

general capacity, but because he does or says something which happened

to need doing or saying at the moment.

This brings us directly to our immediate subject. For such a man is the

holder of a trust It is upon him and those who are like him that the

advance of a community depends. If he is silent, then repair is checked,

and the hurtful elements of worn-out beliefs and waste institutions

remain to enfeeble the society, just as the retention of waste products

enfeebles or poisons the body. If in a spirit of modesty which is often

genuine, though it is often only a veil for love of ease, he asks why he

rather than another should speak, why he before others should refuse

compliance and abstain from conformity, the answer is that though the

many are ultimately moved, it is always one who is first to leave the

old encampment. If the maxim of the compromiser were sound, it ought to

be capable of universal application. Nobody has a right to make an

apology for himself in this matter, which he will not allow to be valid

for others. If one has a right to conceal his true opinions, and to

practice equivocal conformities, then all have a right. One plea for

exemption is in this case as good as another, and no better. That he has

married a wife, that he has bought a yoke of oxen and must prove them,

that he has bidden guests to a feast--one excuse lies on the same level

as the rest. All are equally worthless as answers to the generous

solicitation of enlightened conscience. Suppose, then, that each man on

whom in turn the new ideas dawned wore to borrow the compromiser's plea

and imitate his example. We know what would happen. The exploit in

which no one will consent to go first, remains unachieved. You wait

until there are persons enough agreeing with you to form an effective

party? But how are the members of the band to know one another, if all

are to keep their dissent from the old, and their adherence to the new,

rigorously private? And how many members constitute the innovating band

an effective force! When one-half of the attendants at a church are

unbelievers, will that warrant us in ceasing to attend, or shall we

tarry until the dissemblers number two-thirds? Conceive the additions

which your caution has made to the moral integrity of the community in

the meantime. Measure the enormous hindrances that will have been placed

in the way of truth and improvement, when the day at last arrives on

which you and your two-thirds take heart to say that falsehood and abuse

have now reached their final term, and must at length be swept away into

the outer darkness. Consider how much more terrible the shock of change

will be when it does come, and how much less able will men be to meet

it, and to emerge successfully from it.

Perhaps the compromiser shrinks, not because he fears to march alone,

but because he thinks that the time has not yet come for the progressive

idea which he has made his own, and for whose triumph one day he

confidently hopes. This plea may mean two wholly different states of the

case. The time has not yet come for what? For making those positive

changes in life or institution, which the change in idea must ultimately

involve? That is one thing. Or for propagating, elaborating, enforcing

the new idea, and strenuously doing all that one can to bring as many

people as possible to a state of theory, which will at last permit the

requisite change in practice to be made with safety and success? This is

another and entirely different thing. The time may not have come for the

first of these two courses. The season may not be advanced enough for us

to push on to active conquest. But the time has always come, and the

season is never unripe, for the announcement of the fruitful idea.

We must go further than that. In so far as it can be done by one man

without harming his neighbours, the time has always come for the

realisation of an idea. When the change in way of living or in

institution is one which requires the assent and co-operation of numbers

of people, it may clearly be a matter for question whether men enough

are ready to yield assent and co-operation. But the expression of the

necessity of the change and the grounds of it, though it may not always

be appropriate, can never be premature, and for these reasons. The fact

of a new idea having come to one man is a sign that it is in the air.

The innovator is as much the son of his generation as the conservative.

Heretics have as direct a relation to antecedent conditions as the

orthodox. Truth, said Bacon, has been rightly named the daughter of

Time. The new idea does not spring up uncaused and by miracle. If it has

come to me, there must be others to whom it has only just missed coming.

If I have found my way to the light, there must be others groping after

it very close in my neighbourhood. My discovery is their goal. They are

prepared to receive the new truth, which they were not prepared to find

for themselves. The fact that the mass are not yet ready to receive, any

more than to find, is no reason why the possessor of the new truth

should run to hide under a bushel the candle which has been lighted for

him. If the time has not come for them, at least it has come for him. No

man can ever know whether his neighbours are ready for change or not. He

has all the following certainties, at least:--that he himself is ready

for the change; that he believes it would be a good and beneficent one;

that unless some one begins the work of preparation, assuredly there

will be no consummation; and that if he declines to take a part in the

matter, there can be no reason why every one else in turn should not

decline in like manner, and so the work remain for ever unperformed. The

compromiser who blinds himself to all those points, and acts just as if

the truth were not in him, does for ideas with which he agrees, the very

thing which the acute persecutor does for ideas which he dislikes--he

extinguishes beginnings and kills the germs.

The consideration on which so many persons rely, that an existing

institution, though destined to be replaced by a better, performs useful

functions provisionally, is really not to the point. It is an excellent

reason why the institution should not be removed or fundamentally

modified, until public opinion is ripe for the given piece of

improvement. But it is no reason at all why those who are anxious for

the improvement, should speak and act just as they would do if they

thought the change perfectly needless and undesirable. It is no reason

why those who allow the provisional utility of a belief or an

institution or a custom of living, should think solely of the utility

and forget the equally important element of its provisionalness. For the

fact of its being provisional is the very ground why every one who

perceives this element, should set himself to act accordingly. It is the

ground why he should set himself, in other words, to draw opinion in

every way open to him--by speech, by voting, by manner of life and

conduct--in the direction of new truth and the better practice. Let us

not, because we deem a thing to be useful for the hour, act as if it

were to be useful for ever. The people who selfishly seek to enjoy as

much comfort and ease as they can in an existing state of things, with

the desperate maxim, 'After us, the deluge,' are not any worse than

those who cherish present comfort and case and take the world as it

comes, in the fatuous and self-deluding hope, 'After us, the

millennium.' Those who make no sacrifice to avert the deluge, and those

who make none to hasten their millennium, are on the same moral level.

And the former have at least the quality of being no worse than their

avowed principle, while the latter nullify their pretended hopes by

conformities which are only proper either to profound social

contentment, or to profound social despair. Nay, they seem to think that

there is some merit in this merely speculative hopefulness. They act as

if they supposed that to be very sanguine about the general improvement

of mankind, is a virtue that relieves them from taking trouble about any

improvement in particular.

If those who defend a given institution are doing their work well, that

furnishes the better reason why those who disapprove of it and

disbelieve in its enduring efficacy, should do their work well also.

Take the Christian churches, for instance. Assume, if you will, that

they are serving a variety of useful functions. If that were all, it

would be a reason for conforming. But we are speaking of those for whom

the matter does not end here. If you are convinced that the dogma is not

true; that a steadily increasing number of persons are becoming aware

that it is not true; that its efficacy as a basis of spiritual life is

being lowered in the same degree as its credibility; that both dogma and

church must be slowly replaced by higher forms of faith, if not also by

more effective organisations; then, all who hold such views as these

have as distinctly a function in the community as the ministers and

upholders of the churches, and the zeal of the latter is simply the most

monstrously untenable apology that could be invented for dereliction of

duty by the former.

If the orthodox to some extent satisfy certain of the necessities of the

present, there are other necessities of the future which can only be

satisfied by those who now pass for heretical. The plea which we are

examining, if it is good for the purpose for which it is urged, would

have to be expressed in this way:--The institution is working as

perfectly as it can be made to do, or as any other in its place would be

likely to do, and therefore I will do nothing by word or deed towards

meddling with it. Those who think this, and act accordingly, are the

consistent conservatives of the community. If a man takes up any

position short of this, his conformity, acquiescence, and inertia at

once become inconsistent and culpable. For unless the institution or

belief is entirely adequate, it must be the duty of all who have

satisfied themselves that it is not so, to recognise its deficiences,

and at least to call attention to them, even if they lack opportunity or

capacity to suggest remedies. Now we are dealing with persons who, from

the hypothesis, do not admit that this or that factor in an existing

social state secures all the advantages which might be secured if

instead of that factor there were some other. We are speaking of all the

various kinds of dissidents, who think that the current theology, or an

established church, or a monarchy, or an oligarchic republic, is a bad

thing and a lower form, even at the moment while they attribute

provisional merit to it. They can mean nothing by classing each of

these as bad things, except that they either bring with them certain

serious drawbacks, or exclude certain valuable advantages. The fact that

they perform their functions well, such as they are, leaves the

fundamental vice or defect of these functions just where it was. If any

one really thinks that the current theology involves depraved notions of

the supreme impersonation of good, restricts and narrows the

intelligence, misdirects the religious imagination, and has become

powerless to guide conduct, then how does the circumstance that it

happens not to be wholly and unredeemedly bad in its influence, relieve

our dissident from all care or anxiety as to the points in which, as we

have seen, he does count it inadequate and mischievous? Even if he

thinks it does more good than harm--a position which must be very

difficult for one who believes the common supernatural conception of it

to be entirely false--even then, how is he discharged from the duty of

stigmatising the harm which he admits that it does?

Again, take the case of the English monarchy. Grant, if you will, that

this institution has a certain function, and that by the present chief

magistrate this function is estimably performed. Yet if we are of those

who believe that in the stage of civilisation which England has reached

in other matters, the monarchy must be either obstructive and injurious,

or else merely decorative; and that a merely decorative monarchy tends

in divers ways to engender habits of abasement, to nourish lower social

ideals, to lessen a high civil self-respect in the community; then it

must surely be our duty not to lose any opportunity of pressing these

convictions. To do this is not necessarily to act as if one were anxious

for the immediate removal of the throne and the crown into the museum of

political antiquities. We may have no urgent practical solicitude in

this direction, on the intelligible principle that a free people always

gets as good a kind of government as it deserves. Our conviction is not,

on the present hypothesis, that monarchy ought to be swept away in

England, but that monarchy produces certain mischievous consequences to

the public spirit of the community. And so what we are bound to do is to

take care not to conceal this conviction; to abstain scrupulously from

all kinds of action and observance, public or private, which tend ever

so remotely to foster the ignoble and degrading elements that exist in a

court and spread from it outwards; and to use all the influence we have,

however slight it may be, in loading public opinion to a right attitude

of contempt and dislike for these ignoble and degrading elements, and

the conduct engendered by them. A policy like this does not interfere

with the advantages of the monarchy, such as they are asserted to be,

and it has the effect of making what are supposed to be its

disadvantages as little noxious as possible. The question whether we can

get others to agree with us is not relevant. If we were eager for

instant overthrow, it would be the most relevant of all questions. But

we are in the preliminary stage, the stage for acting on opinion. The

fact that others do not yet share our opinion, is the very reason for

our action. We can only bring them to agree with us, if it be possible

on any terms, by persistency in our principles. This persistency, in all

but either very timid or very vulgar natures, always has been and

always will be independent of external assent or co-operation. The

history of success, as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is

the history of minorities. And what is more, it is for the most part the

history of insurrection exactly against what the worldly spirits of the

time, whenever it may have been, deemed mere trifles and accidents, with

which sensible men should on no account dream of taking the trouble to

quarrel.

'Halifax,' says Macaulay, 'was in speculation a strong republican and

did not conceal it. He often made hereditary monarchy and aristocracy

the subjects of his keen pleasantry, while he was fighting the battles

of the court and obtaining for himself step after step in the peerage.'

We are perfectly familiar with this type, both in men who have, and men

who have not, such brilliant parts as Halifax. Such men profess to

nourish high ideals of life, of character, of social institutions. Yet

they never think of these ideals, when they are deciding what is

practically attainable. One would like to ask them what purpose is

served by an ideal, if it is not to make a guide for practice and a

landmark in dealing with the real. A man's loftiest and most ideal

notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, shall we not say,

senseless kind, if he can never see how to take a single step that may

tend in the slightest degree towards making them more real. If an ideal

has no point of contact with what exists, it is probably not much more

than the vapid outcome of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence. If

it has such a point of contact, then there is sure to be something which

a man can do towards the fulfilment of his hopes. He cannot substitute a

new national religion for the old, but he can at least do something to

prevent people from supposing that the adherents of the old are more

numerous than they really are, and something to show them that good

ideas are not all exhausted by the ancient forms. He cannot transform a

monarchy into a republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least

shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the debasing

complaisance of the crowd.

'It is a very great mistake, said Burke, many years before the French

Revolution is alleged, and most unreasonably alleged, to have alienated

him from liberalism: 'it is a very great mistake to imagine that

mankind follow up practically any speculative principle, either of

government or of freedom, as far as it will go in argument and logical

illation. All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment,

every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and

barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take;--we remit some

rights that we may enjoy others.... Man acts from motives relative to

his interests; and not on metaphysical speculations.[29] These are the

words of wisdom and truth, if we can be sure that men will interpret

them in all the fulness of their meaning, and not be content to take

only that part of the meaning which falls in with the dictates of their

own love of ease. In France such words ought to be printed in capitals

on the front of every newspaper, and written up in letters of burnished

gold over each faction of the Assembly, and on the door of every bureau

in the Administration. In England they need a commentary which shall

bring out the very simple truth, that compromise and barter do not mean

the undisputed triumph of one set of principles. Nor, on the other hand,

do they mean the mutilation of both sets of principles, with a view to

producing a _tertium quid_ that shall involve the disadvantages of each,

without securing the advantages of either. What Burke means is that we

ought never to press our ideas up to their remotest logical issues,

without reference to the conditions in which we are applying them. In

politics we have an art. Success in politics, as in every other art,

obviously before all else implies both knowledge of the material with

which we have to deal, and also such concession as is necessary to the

qualities of the material. Above all, in politics we have an art in

which development depends upon small modifications. That is the true

side of the conservative theory. To hurry on after logical perfection is

to show one's self ignorant of the material of that social structure

with which the politician has to deal. To disdain anything short of an

organic change in thought or institution in infatuation. To be willing

to make such changes too frequently, even when they are possible, is

foolhardiness. That fatal French saying about small reforms being the

worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly

used, a formula of social ruin.

On the other hand, let us not forget that there is a sense in which this

very saying is profoundly true. A small and temporary improvement may

really be the worst enemy of a great and permanent improvement, unless

the first is made on the lines and in the direction of the second. And

so it may, if it be successfully palmed off upon a society as actually

being the second. In such a case as this, and our legislation presents

instances of the kind, the small reform, if it be not made with

reference to some large progressive principle and with a view to further

extension of its scope, makes it all the more difficult to return to the

right line and direction when improvement is again demanded. To take an

example which is now very familiar to us all. The Education Act of 1870

was of the nature of a small reform. No one pretends that it is anything

approaching to a final solution of a complex problem. But the government

insisted, whether rightly or wrongly, that their Act was as large a

measure as public opinion was at that moment ready to support. At the

same time it was clearly agreed among the government and the whole of

the party at their backs, that at some time or other, near or remote, if

public instruction was to be made genuinely effective, the private,

voluntary, or denominational system would have to be replaced by a

national system. To prepare for this ultimate replacement was one of the

points to be most steadily borne in mind, however slowly and tentatively

the process might be conducted. Instead of that, the authors of the Act

deliberately introduced provisions for extending and strengthening the

very system which will have eventually to be superseded. They thus by

their small reform made the future great reform the more difficult of

achievement. Assuredly this is not the compromise and barter, the give

and take, which Burke intended. What Burke means by compromise, and what

every true statesman understands by it, is that it may be most

inexpedient to meddle with an institution merely because it does not

harmonise with 'argument and logical illation.' This is a very different

thing from giving new comfort and strength with one hand, to an

institution whose death-warrant you pretend to be signing with the

other.

In a different way the second possible evil of a small reform may be

equally mischievous--where the small reform is represented as settling

the question. The mischief here is not that it takes us out of the

progressive course, as in the case we have just been considering, but

that it sets men's minds in a posture of contentment, which is not

justified by the amount of what has been done, and which makes it all

the harder to arouse them to new effort when the inevitable time

arrives.

In these ways, then, compromise may mean, not acquiescence in an

instalment, on the ground that the time is not ripe to yield us more

than an instalment, but either the acceptance of the instalment as

final, followed by the virtual abandonment of hope and effort; or else

it may mean a mistaken reversal of direction, which augments the

distance that has ultimately to be traversed. In either of these senses,

the small reform may become the enemy of the great one. But a right

conception of political method, based on a rightly interpreted

experience of the conditions on which societies unite progress with

order, leads the wise conservative to accept the small change, lest a

worse thing befall him, and the wise innovator to seize the chance of a

small improvement, while incessantly working in the direction of great

ones. The important thing is that throughout the process neither of them

should lose sight of his ultimate ideal; nor fail to look at the detail

from the point of view of the whole; nor allow the near particular to

bulk so unduly large as to obscure the general and distant.

If the process seems intolerably slow, we may correct our impatience by

looking back upon the past. People seldom realise the enormous period of

time which each change in men's ideas requires for its full

accomplishment. We speak of these changes with a peremptory kind of

definiteness, as if they had covered no more than the space of a few

years. Thus we talk of the time of the Reformation, as we might talk of

the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Duties. Yet the Reformation is

the name for a movement of the mind of northern Europe, which went on

for three centuries. Then if we turn to that still more momentous set

of events, the rise and establishment of Christianity, one might suppose

from current speech that we could fix that within a space of half a

century or so. Yet it was at least four hundred years before all the

foundations of that great superstructure of doctrine and organisation

were completely laid. Again, to descend to less imposing occurrences,

the transition in the Eastern Empire from the old Roman system of

national organisation to that other system to which we give the specific

name of Byzantine,--this transition, so infinitely less important as it

was than either of the two other movements, yet occupied no less than a

couple of hundred years. The conditions of speech make it indispensable

for us to use definite and compendious names for movements that were

both tardy and complex. We are forced to name a long series of events as

if they were a single event. But we lose the reality of history, we fail

to recognise one of the most striking aspects of human affairs, and

above all we miss that most invaluable practical lesson, the lesson of

patience, unless we remember that the great changes of history took up

long periods of time which, when measured by the little life of a man,

are almost colossal, like the vast changes of geology. We know how long

it takes before a species of plant or animal disappears in face of a

better adapted species. Ideas and customs, beliefs and institutions,

have always lingered just as long in face of their successors, and the

competition is not less keen nor less prolonged, because it is for one

or other inevitably destined to be hopeless. History, like geology,

demands the use of the imagination, and in proportion as the exercise of

the historic imagination is vigorously performed in thinking of the

past, will be the breadth of our conception of the changes which the

future has in store for us, as well as of the length of time and the

magnitude of effort required for their perfect achievement[30].

This much, concerning moderation in political practice. No such

considerations present themselves in the matters which concern the

shaping of our own lives, or the publications of our social opinions. In

this region we are not imposing charges upon others, either by law or

otherwise. We therefore owe nothing to the prejudices or habits of

others. If any one sets serious value upon the point of difference

between his own ideal and that which is current, if he thinks that his

'experiment in living' has promise of real worth, and that if more

persons could be induced to imitate it, some portion of mankind would be

thus put in possession of a better kind of happiness, then it is selling

a birthright for a mess of pottage to abandon hopes so rich and

generous, merely in order to avoid the passing and casual penalties of

social disapproval. And there is a double evil in this kind of flinching

from obedience to the voice of our better selves, whether it takes the

form of absolute suppression of what we think and hope, or only of

timorous and mutilated presentation. We lose not only the possible

advantage of the given change. Besides that, we lose also the certain

advantage of maintaining or increasing the amount of conscientiousness

in the world. And everybody can perceive the loss incurred in a society

where diminution of the latter sort takes place. The advance of the

community depends not merely on the improvement and elevation of its

moral maxima, but also on the quickening of moral sensibility. The

latter work has mostly been effected, when it has been effected on a

large scale, by teachers of a certain singular personal quality. They do

nothing to improve the theory of conduct, but they have the art of

stimulating men to a more enthusiastic willingness to rise in daily

practice to the requirements of whatever theory they may accept. The

love of virtue, of duty, of holiness, or by whatever name we call this

powerful sentiment, exists in the majority of men, where it exists at

all, independently of argument. It is a matter of affection, sympathy,

association, aspiration. Hence, even while, in quality, sense of duty is

a stationary factor, it is constantly changing in quantity. The amount

of conscience in different communities, or in the same community at

different times, varies infinitely. The immediate cause of the decline

of a society in the order of morals is a decline in the quantity of its

conscience, a deadening of its moral sensitiveness, and not a

depravation of its theoretical ethics. The Greeks became corrupt and

enfeebled, not for lack of ethical science, but through the decay in the

numbers of those who were actually alive to the reality and force of

ethical obligations. Mahometans triumphed over Christians in the East

and in Spain--if we may for a moment isolate moral conditions from the

rest of the total circumstances--not because their scheme of duty was

more elevated or comprehensive, but because their respect for duty was

more strenuous and fervid.

The great importance of leaving this priceless element in a community

as free, as keen, and as active as possible, is overlooked by the

thinkers who uphold coercion against liberty, as a saving social

principle. Every act of coercion directed against an opinion or a way of

living is in so far calculated to lessen the quantity of conscience in

the society where such acts are practised. Of course, where ways of

living interfere with the lawful rights of others, where they are not

strictly self-regarding in all their details, it is necessary to force

the dissidents, however strong may be their conscientious sentiment. The

evil of attenuating that sentiment is smaller than the evil of allowing

one set of persons to realise their own notions of happiness, at the

expense of all the rest of the world. But where these notions can be

realised without unlawful interference of that kind, then the forcible

hindrance of such realisation is a direct weakening of the force and

amount of conscience on which the community may count. There is one

memorable historic case to illustrate this. Lewis XIV., in revoking the

Edict of Nantes, and the author of the still more cruel law of 1724, not

only violently drove out multitudes of the most scrupulous part of the

French nation; they virtually offered the most tremendous bribes to

those of less stern resolution, to feign conversion to the orthodox

faith. This was to treat conscience as a thing of mean value. It was to

scatter to the wind with both hands the moral resources of the

community. And who can fail to see the strength which would have been

given to France in her hour of storm, a hundred years after the

revocation of the Edict of Nantes, if her protestant sons, fortified by

the training in the habits of individual responsibility which

protestantism involves, had only been there to aid?

This consideration brings us to a new side of the discussion. We may

seem to have been unconsciously arguing as strongly in favour of a

vigorous social conservatism as of a self-asserting spirit of social

improvement. All that we have been saying may appear to cut both ways.

If the innovator should decline to practise silence or reserve, why

should the possessor of power be less uncompromising, and why should he

not impose silence by force? If the heretic ought to be uncompromising

in expressing his opinions, and in acting upon them, in the fulness of

his conviction that they are right, why should not the orthodox be

equally uncompromising in his resolution to stamp out the heretical

notions and unusual ways of living, in the fulness of his conviction

that they are thoroughly wrong? To this question the answer is that the

hollow kinds of compromise are as bad in the orthodox as in the

heretical. Truth has as much to gain from sincerity and thoroughness in

one as in the other. But the issue between the partisans of the two

opposed schools turns upon the sense which we design to give to the

process of stamping out. Those who cling to the tenets of liberty limit

the action of the majority, as of the minority, strictly to persuasion.

Those who dislike liberty, insist that earnestness of conviction

justifies either a majority or a minority in using not persuasion only,

but force. I do not propose here to enter into the great question which

Mr. Mill pressed anew upon the minds of this generation. His arguments

are familiar to every reader, and the conclusion at which he arrived is

almost taken for a postulate in the present essay.[31] The object of

these chapters is to reiterate the importance of self-assertion,

tenacity, and positiveness of principle. The partisan of coercion will

argue that this thesis is on one side of it a justification of

persecution, and other modes of interfering with new opinions and new

ways of living by force, and the strong arm of the law, and whatever

other energetic means of repression may be at command. If the minority

are to be uncompromising alike in seeking and realising what they take

for truth, why not the majority? Now this implies two propositions. It

is the same as to say, first, that earnestness of conviction is not to

be distinguished from a belief in our own infallibility; second, that

faith in our infallibility is necessarily bound up with intolerance.

Neither of these propositions is true. Let us take them in turn.

Earnestness of conviction is perfectly compatible with a sense of

liability to error. This has been so excellently put by a former writer

that we need not attempt to better his exposition. 'Every one must, of

course, think his own opinions right; for if he thought them wrong, they

would no longer be his opinions: but there is a wide difference between

regarding ourselves as infallible, and being firmly convinced of the

truth of our creed. When a man reflects on any particular doctrine, he

may be impressed with a thorough conviction of the improbability or even

impossibility of its being false: and so he may feel with regard to all

his other opinions, when he makes them objects of separate

contemplation. And yet when he views them in the aggregate, when he

reflects that not a single being on the earth holds collectively the

same, when he looks at the past history and present state of mankind,

and observes the various creeds of different ages and nations, the

peculiar modes of thinking of sects and bodies and individuals, the

notions once firmly held, which have been exploded, the prejudices once

universally prevalent, which have been removed, and the endless

controversies which have distracted those who have made it the business

of their lives to arrive at the truth; and when he further dwells on

the consideration that many of these, his fellow-creatures, have had a

conviction of the justness of their respective sentiments equal to his

own, he cannot help the obvious inference, that in his own opinion it is

next to impossible that there is not an admixture of error; that there

is an infinitely greater probability of his being wrong in some than

right in all.'[32]

Of course this is not an account of the actual frame of mind of ordinary

men. They never do think of their opinions in the aggregate in

comparison with the collective opinions of others, nor ever draw the

conclusions which such reflections would suggest. But such a frame of

mind is perfectly attainable, and has often been attained, by persons of

far lower than first-rate capacity. And if this is so, there is no

reason why it should not be held up for the admiration and imitation of

all those classes of society which profess to have opinions. It would

thus become an established element in the temper of the age. Nor need we

fear that the result of this would be any flaccidity of conviction, or

lethargy in act. A man would still be penetrated with the rightness of

his own opinion on a given issue, and would still do all that he could

to make it prevail in practice. But among the things which he would no

longer permit himself to do, would be the forcible repression in others

of any opinions, however hostile to his own, or of any kind of conduct,

however widely it diverged from his own, and provided that it concerned

themselves only. This widening of his tolerance would be the natural

result of a rational and realised consciousness of his own general

fallibility.

Next, even belief in one's own infallibility does not necessarily lead

to intolerance. For it may be said that though no man in his senses

would claim to be incapable of error, yet in every given case he is

quite sure that he is not in error, and therefore this assurance in

particular is tantamount by process of cumulation to a sense of

infallibility in general. Now even if this were so, it would not of

necessity either produce or justify intolerance. The certainty of the

truth of your own opinions is independent of any special idea as to the

means by which others may best be brought to share them. The question

between persuasion and force remains apart--unless, indeed, we may say

that in societies where habits of free discussion have once begun to

take root, those who are least really sure about their opinions, are

often most unwilling to trust to persuasion to bring them converts, and

most disposed to grasp the rude implements of coercion, whether legal or

merely social. The cry, 'Be my brother, or I slay thee,' was the sign of

a very weak, though very fiery, faith in the worth of fraternity. He

whose faith is most assured, has the best reason for relying on

persuasion, and the strongest motive to thrust from him all temptations

to use angry force. The substitution of force for persuasion, among its

other disadvantages, has this further drawback, from our present point

of view, that it lessens the conscience of a society and breeds

hypocrisy. You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him.

Opinion and force belong to different elements. To think that you are

able by social disapproval or other coercive means to crush a man's

opinion, is as one who should fire a blunderbuss to put out a star. The

acquiescence in current notions which is secured by law or by petulant

social disapproval, is as worthless and as essentially hypocritical, as

the conversion of an Irish pauper to protestantism by means of

soup-tickets, or that of a savage to Christianity by the gift of a

string of beads. Here is the radical fallacy of those who urge that

people must use promises and threats in order to encourage opinions,

thoughts, and feelings which they think good, and to prevent others

which they think bad. Promises and threats can influence acts. Opinions

and thoughts on morals, politics, and the rest, after they have once

grown in a man's mind, can no more be influenced by promises and threats

than can my knowledge that snow is white or that ice is cold. You may

impose penalties on me by statute for saying that snow is white, or

acting as if I thought ice cold, and the penalties may affect my

conduct. They will not, because they cannot, modify my beliefs in the

matter by a single iota. One result therefore of intolerance is to make

hypocrites. On this, as on the rest of the grounds which vindicate the

doctrine of liberty, a man who thought himself infallible either in

particular or in general, from the Pope of Rome down to the editor of

the daily newspaper, might still be inclined to abstain from any form of

compulsion. The only reason to the contrary is that a man who is so

silly as to think himself incapable of going wrong, is very likely to be

too silly to perceive that coercion may be one way of going wrong.

The currency of the notion that earnest sincerity about one's opinions

and ideals of conduct is inseparably connected with intolerance, is

indirectly due to the predominance of legal or juristic analogies in

social discussion. For one thing, the lawyer has to deal mainly with

acts, and to deal with them by way of repression. His attention is

primarily fixed on the deed, and only secondarily on the mind of the

doer. And so a habit of thought is created, which treats opinion as

something equally in the sphere of coercion with actions. At the same

time it favours coercive ways of affecting opinion. Then, what is still

more important, the jurist's conception of society has its root in the

relation between sovereign and subject, between lawmaker and those whom

law restrains. Exertion of power on one hand, and compliance on the

other--this is his type of the conditions of the social union. The

fertility and advance of discussion on social issues depends on the

substitution of the evolutional for the legal conception. The lawyer's

type of proposition is absolute. It is also, for various reasons which

need not be given here, inspired by involuntary reference to the lower,

rather than to the more highly developed, social states. In the lower

states law, penalties, coercion, compulsion, the strong hand, a sternly

repressive public opinion, were the conditions on which the community

was united and held together. But the line of thought which these

analogies suggest, becomes less and less generally appropriate in social

discussion, in proportion as the community becomes more complex, more

various in resource, more special in its organisation, in a word, more

elaborately civilised. The evolutionist's idea of society concedes to

law its historic place and its actual part. But then this idea leads

directly to a way of looking at society, which makes the replacement of

law by liberty a condition of reaching the higher stages of social

development.

The doctrine of liberty belongs to the subject of this chapter, because

it is only another way of expressing the want of connection between

earnestness in realising our opinions, and anything like coercion in

their favour. If it were true that aversion from compromise, in carrying

out our ideas, implied the rightfulness of using all the means in our

power to hinder others from carrying out ideas hostile to them, then we

should have been preaching in a spirit unfavourable to the principle of

liberty. Our main text has been that men should refuse to sacrifice

their opinions and ways of living (in the self-regarding sphere) out of

regard to the _status quo_, or the prejudices of others. And this, as a

matter of course, excludes the right of forcing or wishing any one else

to make such a sacrifice to us. Well, the first foundation-stone for the

doctrine of liberty is to be sought in the conception of society as a

growing and developing organism. This is its true base, apart from the

numerous minor expediencies which may be adduced to complete the

structure of the argument. It is fundamentally advantageous that in

societies which have reached our degree of complex and intricate

organisation, unfettered liberty should be conceded to ideas and, within

the self-regarding sphere, to conduct also. The reasons for this are of

some such kind as the following. New ideas and new 'experiments in

living' would not arise, if there were not a certain inadequateness in

existing ideas and ways of living. They may not point to the right mode

of meeting inadequateness, but they do point to the existence and

consciousness of it. They originate in the social capability of growth.

Society can only develop itself on condition that all such novelties

(within the limit laid down, for good and valid reasons, at self

regarding conduct) are allowed to present themselves. First, because

neither the legislature nor any one else can ever know for certain what

novelties will prove of enduring value. Second, because even if we did

know for certain that given novelties were pathological growths and not

normal developments, and that they never would be of any value, still

the repression necessary to extirpate them would involve too serious a

risk both of keeping back social growth at some other point, and of

giving the direction of that growth an irreparable warp. And let us

repeat once more, in proportion as a community grows more complex in its

classes, divisions, and subdivisions, more intricate in its productive,

commercial, or material arrangements, so does this risk very obviously

wax more grave.

In the sense in which we are speaking of it, liberty is not a positive

force, any more than the smoothness of a railroad is a positive

force.[33] It is a condition. As a force, there is a sense in which it

is true to call liberty a negation. As a condition, though it may still

be a negation, yet it may be indispensable for the production of certain

positive results. The vacuity of an exhausted receiver is not a force,

but it is the indispensable condition of certain positive operations.

Liberty as a force may be as impotent as its opponents allege. This does

not affect its value as a preliminary or accompanying condition. The

absence of a strait-waistcoat is a negation; but it is a useful

condition for the activity of sane men. No doubt there must be a

definite limit to this absence of external interference with conduct,

and that limit will be fixed at various points by different thinkers. We

are now only urging that it cannot be wisely fixed for the more complex

societies by any one who has not grasped this fundamental preconception,

that liberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to

think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is

the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it

inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge

it by coercion, whether direct or indirect.

One reason why this truth is so reluctantly admitted, is men's

irrational want of faith in the self-protective quality of a highly

developed and healthy community. The timid compromiser on the one hand,

and the advocate of coercive restriction on the other, are equally the

victims of a superfluous apprehension. The one fears to use his liberty

for the same reason that makes the other fearful of permitting liberty.

This common reason is the want of a sensible confidence that, in a free

western community, which has reached our stage of development,

religious, moral, and social novelties--provided they are tainted by no

element of compulsion or interference with the just rights of others,

may be trusted to find their own level. Moral and intellectual

conditions are not the only motive forces in a community, nor are they

even the most decisive. Political and material conditions fix the limits

at which speculation can do either good or harm. Let us take an

illustration of the impotence of moral ideas to override material

circumstances; and we shall venture to place this illustration somewhat

fully before the reader.

There is no more important distinction between modern civilised

communities and the ancient communities than the fact that the latter

rested on Slavery, while the former have abolished it. Hence there can

hardly be a more interesting question than this--by what agencies so

prodigious a transformation of one of the fundamental conditions of

society was brought about. The popular answer is of a very ready kind,

and it passes quite satisfactorily. This answer is that the first great

step towards free labour, the transformation of personal slavery into

serfdom, was the result of the spiritual change which was wrought in

men's minds by the teaching of the Church. It is unquestionable that the

influence of the Church tended to mitigate the evils of slavery, to

humanise the relations between master and slave, between the lord and

the serf. But this is a very different thing from the radical

transformation of those relations. If we think of society as an

organism we instantly understand that so immense a change as this could

not possibly have been effected without the co-operation of the other

great parts of the social system, any more than a critical evolution

could take place in the nutritive apparatus of an animal, without a

change in the whole series of its organs. Thus in order that serfage

should be evolved from slavery, and free labour again from serfage, it

could not be enough that an alteration should have been wrought in men's

ideas as to their common brotherhood, and the connected ideas as to the

lawfulness or unlawfulness of certain human relations. There must have

been an alteration also of the economic and material conditions. History

confirms the expectations which we should thus have been led to

entertain. The impotence of spiritual and moral agencies alone in

bringing about this great metamorphosis, is shown by such facts as

these. For centuries after the new faith had consolidated itself,

slavery was regarded without a particle of that deep abhorrence which

the possession of man by man excites in us now. In the ninth and tenth

centuries the slave trade was the most profitable branch of the

commerce that was carried on in the Mediterranean. The historian tells

us that, even so late as this, slaves were the principal article of

European export to Africa, Syria, and Egypt, in payment for the produce

of the East which was brought from those countries. It was the crumbling

of the old social system which, by reducing the population, lessening

the wealth, and lowering the standard of living among the free masters,

tended to extinguish slavery, by diminishing the differences between the

masters and their bondsmen. Again, it was certain laws enacted by the

Roman government for the benefit of the imperial fisc, which first

conferred rights on the slave. The same laws brought the free farmer,

whose position was less satisfactory for the purposes of the revenue,

down nearer and nearer to a servile condition. Again, in the ninth and

tenth centuries, pestilence and famine accelerated the extinction of

predial slavery by weakening the numbers of the free population.

'History,' we are told by that thoroughly competent authority, Mr.

Finlay, 'affords its testimony that neither the doctrines of

Christianity, nor the sentiments of humanity, have ever yet succeeded

in extinguishing slavery, where the soil could be cultivated with profit

by slave labour. No Christian community of slave-holders has yet

voluntarily abolished slavery. In no country where it prevailed has

rural slavery ceased, until the price of productions raised by slave

labour has fallen so low as to leave no profit to the slave-owner.'

The moral of all this is the tolerably obvious truth, that the

prosperity of an abstract idea depends as much on the medium into which

it is launched, as upon any quality of its own. Stable societies are

amply furnished with force enough to resist all effort in a destructive

direction. There is seldom much fear, and in our own country there is

hardly any fear at all, of hasty reformers making too much way against

the spontaneous conservatism which belongs to a healthy and

well-organised community. If dissolvent ideas do make their way, it is

because the society was already ripe for dissolution. New ideas, however

ardently preached, will dissolve no society which was not already in a

condition of profound disorganisation. We may be allowed just to point

to two memorable instances, by way of illustration, though a long and

elaborate discussion would be needed to bring out their full force. It

has often been thought since, as it was thought by timorous

reactionaries at the time, that Christianity in various ways sapped the

strength of the Roman Empire, and opened the way for the barbarians. In

truth, the most careful and competent students know now that the Empire

slowly fell to pieces, partly because the political arrangements were

vicious and inadequate, but mainly because the fiscal and economic

system impoverished and depopulated one district of the vast empire

after another. It was the break-up of the Empire that gave the Church

its chance; not the Church that broke up the Empire. It is a mistake of

the same kind to suppose that the destructive criticism of the French

philosophers a hundred years ago was the great operative cause of the

catastrophe which befel the old social régime. If Voltaire, Diderot,

Rousseau, had never lived, or if their works had all been suppressed as

soon as they were printed, their absence would have given no new life to

agriculture, would not have stimulated trade, nor replenished the

bankrupt fisc, nor incorporated the privileged classes with the bulk of

the nation, nor done anything else to repair an organisation of which

every single part had become incompetent for its proper function. It was

the material misery and the political despair engendered by the reigning

system, which brought willing listeners to the feet of the teachers who

framed beneficent governments on the simple principles of reason and the

natural law. And these teachers only busied themselves with abstract

politics, because the real situation was desperate. They had no

alternative but to evolve social improvements out of their own

consciousness. There was not a single sound organ in the body politic,

which they could have made the starting-point of a reconstitution of a

society on the base of its actual or historic structure. The mischiefs

which resulted from their method are patent and undeniable. But the

method was made inevitable by the curse of the old régime.[34]

Nor is there any instance in history of mere opinion making a breach in

the essential constitution of a community, so long as the political

conditions were stable and the economic or nutritive conditions sound.

If some absolute monarch were to be seized by a philanthropic resolution

to transform the ordering of a society which seemed to be at his

disposal, he might possibly, by the perseverance of a lifetime, succeed

in throwing the community into permanent confusion. Joseph II. perhaps

did as much as a modern sovereign can do in this direction. Yet little

came of his efforts, either for good or harm. But a man without the

whole political machinery in his power need hardly labour under any

apprehension that he may, by the mere force of speculative opinion,

involuntarily work a corresponding mischief. If it is true that the most

fervent apostles of progress usually do very little of the good on which

they congratulate themselves, they ought surely on the same ground to be

acquitted of much of the harm for which they are sometimes reviled. In a

country of unchecked and abundant discussion, a new idea is not at all

likely to make much way against the objection of its novelty, unless it

is really commended by some quality of temporary or permanent value. So

far therefore as the mere publication of new principles is concerned,

and so far also as merely self-regarding action goes, one who has the

keenest sense of social responsibility, and is most scrupulously afraid

of doing anything to slacken or perturb the process of social growth,

may still consistently give to the world whatever ideas he has gravely

embraced. He may safely trust, if the society be in a normal condition,

to its justice of assimilation and rejection. There are a few

individuals for whom newness is a recommendation. But what are these

few among the many to whom newness is a stumbling-block? Old ideas may

survive merely because they are old. A new one will certainly not, among

a considerable body of men in a healthy social state, gain any

acceptance worth speaking of, merely because it is new.

The recognition of the self-protecting quality of society is something

more than a point of speculative importance. It has a direct practical

influence. For it would add to the courage and intrepidity of the men

who are most attached to the reigning order of things. If such men could

only divest themselves of a futile and nervous apprehension, that things

as they are have no root in their essential fitness and harmony, and

that order consequently is ever hanging on a trembling and doubtful

balance, they would not only gain by the self-respect which would be

added to them and the rest of the community, but all discussion would

become more robust and real. If they had a larger faith in the stability

for which they profess so great an anxiety, they would be more free

alike in understanding and temper to deal generously, honestly, and

effectively with those whom they count imprudent innovators. There is

nothing more amusing or more instructive than to turn to the debates in

parliament or the press upon some innovating proposal, after an interval

since the proposal was accepted by the legislature. The flaming hopes of

its friends, the wild and desperate prophecies of its antagonists, are

found to be each as ill-founded as the other. The measure which was to

do such vast good according to the one, such portentous evil according

to the other, has done only a part of the promised good, and has done

none of the threatened evil. The true lesson from this is one of

perseverance and thoroughness for the improver, and one of faith in the

self-protectiveness of a healthy society for the conservative. The

master error of the latter is to suppose that men are moved mainly by

their passions rather than their interests, that all their passions are

presumably selfish and destructive, and that their own interests can

seldom be adequately understood by the persons most directly concerned.

How many fallacies are involved in this group of propositions, the

reader may well be left to judge for himself.

We have in this chapter considered some of the limitations which are

set by the conditions of society on the duty of trying to realise our

principles in action. The general conclusion is in perfect harmony with

that of the previous chapters. A principle, if it be sound, represents

one of the larger expediencies. To abandon that for the sake of some

seeming expediency of the hour, is to sacrifice the greater good for the

less, on no more creditable ground than that the less is nearer. It is

better to wait, and to defer the realisation of our ideas until we can

realise them fully, than to defraud the future by truncating them, if

truncate them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them in

the immediate present. It is better to bear the burden of

impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle

until it becomes more hollowness and triviality. What is the sense, and

what is the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower?

Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct of

nobleness, and character of elevation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: _The Study of Sociology_, p. 396.]

[Footnote 28: No one, for instance, has given more forcible or decisive

expression than Mr. Spencer has done to the duty of not passively

accepting the current theology. See his _First Principles_, pt. i. ch.

vi, § 34; paragraph beginning,--'Whoever hesitates to utter that which

he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of

the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal

point of view,' etc.]

[Footnote 29: _Speech on Conciliation with America_.]

[Footnote 30: 'Toute énormité dans les esprits d'un certain ordre n'est

souvent qu'une grande vue prise hors du temps et du lieu, et ne gardant

aucun rapport réel avec les objets environnants. Le propre de certaines

prunelles ardentes est de franchir du regard les intervalles et de les

supprimer. Tantôt c'est une idée qui retarde de plusieurs siècles, et

que ces vigoureux esprits se figurent encore présente et vivante; tantôt

c'est une idée qui avance, et qu'ils croient incontinent réalisable. M.

de Couaën était ainsi; il voyait 1814 dès 1804, et de là une

supériorité; mais il jugeait 1814 possible dès 1804 ou 1805, et de là

tout un chimérique entassement.--Voilà un point blanc à l'horizon,

chacun jurerait que c'est un nuage. "C'est une montagne," dit le

voyageur à l'oeil d'aigle; mais s'il ajoute: "Nous y arriverons ce soir,

dans deux heures;" si, à chaque heure de marche, il crie avec

emportement: "Nous y sommes," et le veut démontrer, il choque les

voisins avec sa poutre, et donne l'avantage aux yeux moins perçants et

plus habitués à la plaine.'--Ste. Beuve's _Volupté_, p. 262]

[Footnote 31: It is sometimes convenient to set familiar arguments down

once more; so I venture to reprint in a note at the end of the chapter a

short exposition of the doctrine of liberty, which I had occasion to

make in considering Sir J.F. Stephen's vigorous attack on that

doctrine.]

[Footnote 32: Mr. Samuel Bailey's _Essays on the Formation and

Publication of Opinions_, etc., p. 138, (1826.)]

[Footnote 33: There is a sense, and a most important sense, in which

liberty is a positive force. It is its robust and bracing influence on

character, which makes wise men prize freedom and strive for the

enlargement of its province. As Mr. Mill expressed this:--'It is of

importance not only what men do, but what manner of men they are that do

it,' Milton pointed to the positive effect of liberty on character in

the following passage:--'They are not skilful considerers of human

things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin. Though

ye take from a covetous man his treasure, he has yet one jewel left; ye

cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut

up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any

hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not thither so. Suppose

we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of sin, so

much we expel of virtue. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing

should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of

evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one

virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious.']

[Footnote 34: There is, I think, nothing in this paragraph really

inconsistent with De Tocqueville's well-known and striking chapter,

'Comment les hommes de lettres devinrent les principaux hommes

politiques du pays, et des effets qui en résultèrent.' (_Ancien Régime_,

iii. i.) Thus Sénac de Meilhan writes in 1795;--'C'est quand la

Révolution a été entamée qu'on a cherché dans Mably, dans Rousseau, des

armes pour sustenter le système vers lequel entrainait l'effervescence

de quelques esprits hardis. Mais ce ne sont point les auteurs que j'ai

cités qui ont enflamme les têtes; M. Necker seul a produit cet effet, et

déterminé l'explosion,' ... 'Les écrits de Voltaire ont certainement nui

à la religion, et ébranlé la croyance dans un assez grand nombre; mais

ils n'ont aucun rapport avec les affaires du gouvernement, et sont plus

favorables que contraires à la monarchie....' Of Rousseau's _Social

Contract_:--'Ce livre profond et abstrait était peu lu, et etendu de

bien peu de gens.' Mably--'avait peu de vogue.' _De Gouvernment, etc.,

en France_, p. 129, etc.]

NOTE TO PAGE 242.

THE DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY.

Mr. Mill's memorable plea for social liberty was little more than an

enlargement, though a very important enlargement, of the principles of

the still more famous Speech for Liberty of Unlicensed Printing with

which Milton ennobled English literature two centuries before. Milton

contended for free publication of opinion mainly on these grounds:

First, that the opposite system implied the 'grace of infallibility and

incorruptibleness' in the licensers. Second, that the prohibition of

bold books led to mental indolence and stagnant formalism both in

teachers and congregations, producing the 'laziness of a licensing

church.' Third, that it 'hinders and retards the importation of our

richest merchandise, truth;' for the commission of the licenser enjoins

him to let nothing pass which is not vulgarly received already, and 'if

it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited

than truth itself, whose first appearance to our eyes, bleared and

dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible

than many errors, even as the person is of many a great man slight and

contemptible to see to.' Fourth, that freedom is in itself an ingredient

of true virtue, and 'they are not skilful considerers of human things

who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; that virtue

therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and

knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects

it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her virtue is but an excremental

virtue, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom

I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,

describing true temperance under the form of Guion, brings him in with

his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the tower of earthly bliss,

that he might see and know and yet abstain.'

The four grounds on which Mr. Mill contends for the necessity of freedom

in the expression of opinion to the mental wellbeing of mankind, are

virtually contained in these. His four grounds are, (1) that the

silenced opinion may be true; (2) it may contain a portion of truth,

essential to supplement the prevailing opinion; (3) vigorous contesting

of opinions that are even wholly true, is the only way of preventing

them from sinking to the level of uncomprehended prejudices; (4) without

such contesting, the doctrine will lose its vital effect on character

and conduct.

But Milton drew the line of liberty at what he calls 'neighbouring

differences, or rather indifferences.' The Arminian controversy had

loosened the bonds with which the newly liberated churches of the

Reformation, had made haste to bind themselves again, and weakened that

authority of confessions, which had replaced the older but not more

intolerant authority of the universal church. Other controversies which

raged during the first half of the seventeenth century,--those between

catholics and protestants, between prelatists and presbyterians, between

socinians and trinitarians, between latitudinarians, puritans, and

sacramentalists,--all tended to weaken theological exclusiveness. This

slackening, however, was no more than partial. Roger Williams, indeed,

the Welsh founder of Rhode Island, preached, as early as 1631, the

principles of an unlimited toleration, extending to catholics, Jews, and

even infidels. Milton stopped a long way short of this. He did not mean

'tolerated popery and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all

religious and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided

first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and

regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil

absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit

that intends not to unlaw itself.'

Locke, writing five-and-forty years later, somewhat widened these

limitations. His question was not merely whether there should be free

expression of opinion, but whether there should furthermore be freedom

of worship and of religious union. He answered both questions

affirmatively,--not on the semi-sceptical ground of Jeremy Taylor, which

is also one of the grounds taken by Mr. Mill, that we cannot be sure

that our own opinion is the true one,--but on the strength of his

definition of the province of the civil magistrate. Locke held that the

magistrate's whole jurisdiction reached only to civil concernments, and

that 'all civil power, right, and dominion is bounded to that only care

of promoting these things; and that it neither can nor ought in any

manner to be extended to the saving of souls. This chiefly because the

power of the civil magistrate consists only in outward force, while true

and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind,

without which nothing can be acceptable to God, and such is the nature

of the understanding that it cannot he compelled to the belief of

anything by outward force.... It is only light and evidence that can

work a change in men's opinions; and that light can in no manner proceed

from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.' 'I may grow

rich by an art that I take not delight in; I may be cured of some

disease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a

religion that at I distrust and a ritual that I abhor.' (_First Letter

concerning Toleration_.) And much more in the same excellent vein. But

Locke fixed limits to toleration. 1. No opinions contrary to human

society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation

of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. Thus, to take

examples from our own day, a conservative minister would think himself

right on this principle in suppressing the Land and Labour League; a

catholic minister in dissolving the Education League; and any minister

in making mere membership of the Mormon sect a penal offence. 2. No

tolerance ought to be extended to 'those who attribute unto the

faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is in plain terms unto

themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in

civil concernments; or who, upon pretence of religion, do challenge any

manner of authority over such as are not associated with them in their

ecclesiastical communion.' As I have seldom heard of any sect, except

the Friends, who did not challenge as much authority as it could

possibly get over persons not associated with it, this would amount to a

universal proscription of religion; but Locke's principle might at any

rate be invoked against Ultra-montanism in some circumstances. 3. Those

are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. The taking

away of God, _though but even in thought_, dissolves all society; and

promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society,

have no hold on such. Thus the police ought to close Mr. Bradlaugh's

Hall of Science, and perhaps on some occasions the Positivist School.

Locke's principles depended on a distinction between civil concernments,

which he tries to define, and all other concernments. Warburton's

arguments on the alliance between church and state turned on the same

point, as did the once-famous Bangorian controversy. This distinction

would fit into Mr. Mill's cardinal position, which consists in a

distinction between the things that only affect the doer or thinker of

them, and the things that affect other persons as well. Locke's attempt

to divide civil affairs from affairs of salvation, was satisfactory

enough for the comparatively narrow object with which he opened his

discussion. Mr. Mill's account of civil affairs is both wider and more

definite; naturally so, as he had to maintain the cause of tolerance in

a much more complex set of social conditions, and amid a far greater

diversity of speculative energy, than any one dreamed of in Locke's

time. Mr. Mill limits the province of the civil magistrate to the

repression of acts that directly and immediately injure others than the

doer of them. So long as acts, including the expression of opinions, are

purely self-regarding, it seems to him expedient in the long run that

they should not be interfered with by the magistrate. He goes much

further than this. Self-regarding acts should not be interfered with by

the magistrate. Not only self-regarding acts, but all opinions

whatever, should, moreover, be as little interfered with as possible by

public opinion, except in the way of vigorous argumentation and earnest

persuasion in a contrary direction; the silent but most impressive

solicitation of virtuous example; the wise and careful upbringing of the

young, so that when they enter life they may be most nobly fitted to

choose the right opinions and obey the right motives.

The consideration by which he supports this rigorous confinement of

external interference on the part of government, or the unorganised

members of the community whose opinion is called public opinion, to

cases of self-protection, are these, some of which have been already

stated:--

1. By interfering to suppress opinions or experiments in living, you may

resist truths and improvements in a greater or less degree.

2. Constant discussion is the only certain means of preserving the

freshness of truth in men's minds, and the vitality of its influence

upon their conduct and motives.

3. Individuality is one of the most valuable elements of wellbeing, and

you can only be sure of making the most of individuality, if you have an

atmosphere of freedom, encouraging free development and expansion.

4. Habitual resort to repressive means of influencing conduct tends more

than anything else to discredit and frustrate the better means, such as

education, good example, and the like. (_Liberty_, 148.)

The principle which he deduces from these considerations is--'that the

sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively,

in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is

self-protection; the only purpose for which power can be rightfully

exercised over any member of a civilised community, is to prevent harm

to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient

warrant. He cannot be rightfully compelled to do or forbear because it

will make him happier, because in the opinion of others to do so would

be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with

him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but

not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do

otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to

deter him must be calculated to produce evil to others.' (_Liberty_,

22.)

Two disputable points in the above doctrine are likely at once to reveal

themselves to the least critical eye. First, that doctrine would seem to

check the free expression of disapproval; one of the most wholesome and

indispensable duties which anybody with interest in serious questions

has to perform, and the non-performance of which would remove the most

proper and natural penalty from frivolous or perverse opinions and

obnoxious conduct. Mr. Mill deals with this difficulty as follows:--'We

have a right in various ways to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any

one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of

ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a

right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance) for we have a

right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and

it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his

example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with

whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional

good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these

various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of

others for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers

these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and as it were

the spontaneous, consequences of the faults themselves, not because they

are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.' (_Liberty_,

139.) This appears to be a satisfactory way of meeting the objection.

For though the penalties of disapproval may be just the same, whether

deliberately inflicted, or naturally and spontaneously falling on the

object of such disapproval, yet there is a very intelligible difference

between the two processes in their effect on the two parties concerned.

A person imbued with Mr. Mill's principle would feel the responsibility

of censorship much more seriously; would reflect more carefully and

candidly about the conduct or opinion of which he thought ill; would be

more on his guard against pharisaic censoriousness, and that desire to

be ever judging one another, which Milton well called the stronghold of

our hypocrisy. The disapproval of such a person would have an austere

colour, a gravity, a self-respecting reserve, which could never belong

to an equal degree of disapproval in a person who had started from the

officious principle, that if we are sure we are right, it is straightway

our business to make the person whom we think wrong smart for his error.

And in the same way such disapproval would be much more impressive to

the person whom it affected. If it was justified, he would be like a

froward child who is always less effectively reformed--if reformable at

all--by angry chidings and passionate punishments than by the sight of a

cool and austere displeasure which lets him persist in his frowardness

if he chooses.

The second weak point in the doctrine lies in the extreme vagueness of

the terms, protective and self-regarding. The practical difficulty

begins with the definition of these terms. Can any opinion, or any

serious part of conduct, be looked upon as truly and exclusively

self-regarding? This central ingredient in the discussion seems

insufficiently laboured in the essay on Liberty. Yet it is here more

than anywhere else that controversy is needed to clear up what is in

just as much need of elucidation, whatever view we may take of the

inherent virtue of freedom--whether we look on freedom as a mere

negation, or as one of the most powerful positive conditions of

attaining the highest kind of human excellence.

To some persons the analysis of conduct, on which the whole doctrine of

liberty rests, seems metaphysical and arbitrary. They are reluctant to

admit there are any self-regarding acts at all. This reluctance implies

a perfectly tenable proposition, a proposition which has been maintained

by nearly all religious bodies in the world's history in their

non-latitudinarian stages. To distinguish the self-regarding from the

other parts of conduct, strikes them not only as unscientific, but as

morally and socially mischievous. They insist that there is a social as

well as a personal element in every human act, though in very different

proportions. There is no gain, they contend, and there may be much harm,

in trying to mark off actions, in which the personal element decisively

preponderates, from actions of another sort. Mr. Mill did so distinguish

actions, nor was his distinction either metaphysical or arbitrary in its

source. As a matter of observation, and for the practical purposes of

morality, there are kinds of action whose consequences do not go beyond

the doer of them. No doubt, you may say that by engaging in these kinds

in any given moment, the doer is neglecting the actions in which the

social element preponderates, and therefore even acts that seem purely

self-regarding have indirect and negative consequences to the rest of

the world. But to allow considerations of this sort to prevent us from

using a common-sense classification of acts by the proportion of the

personal element in them, is as unreasonable as if we allowed the

doctrine of the conservation of physical force, or the evolution of one

mode of force into another, to prevent us from classifying the

affections of matter independently, as light, heat, motion, and the

rest. There is one objection obviously to be made to most of the

illustrations which are designed to show the public element in all

private conduct. The connection between the act and its influence on

others is so remote (using the word in a legal sense), though quite

certain, distinct, and traceable, that you can only take the act out of

the self-regarding category, by a process which virtually denies the

existence of any such category. You must set a limit to this 'indirect

and at-a-distance argument,' as Locke called a similar plea, and the

setting of this limit is the natural supplement to Mr. Mill's 'simple

principle.'

The division between self-regarding acts and others then, rests on

observation of their actual consequences. And why was Mr. Mill so

anxious to erect self-regarding acts into a distinct and important

class, so important as to be carefully and diligently secured by a

special principle of liberty? Because observation of the recorded

experience of mankind teaches us, that the recognition of this

independent provision is essential to the richest expansion of human

faculty. To narrow or to repudiate such a province, and to insist

exclusively on the social bearing of each part of conduct, is to limit

the play of motives, and to thwart the doctrine that 'mankind obtain a

greater sum of happiness when each pursues his own, under the rules and

conditions required by the rest, than when each makes the good of the

rest his only object.' To narrow or to repudiate such a province is to

tighten the power of the majority over the minority, and to augment the

authority of whatever sacerdotal or legislative body may represent the

majority. Whether the lawmakers be laymen in parliament, or priests of

humanity exercising the spiritual power, it matters not.

We may best estimate the worth and the significance of the doctrine of

Liberty by considering the line of thought and observation which led to

it. To begin with, it is in Mr. Mill's hands something quite different

from the same doctrine as preached by the French revolutionary school;

indeed one might even call it reactionary, in respect of the French

theory of a hundred years back. It reposes on no principle of abstract

right, but, like the rest of its author's opinions, on principles of

utility and experience. Dr. Arnold used to divide reformers into two

classes, popular and liberal. The first he defined as seekers of

liberty, the second as seekers of improvement; the first were the goats,

and the second were the sheep. Mr. Mill's doctrine denied the mutual

exclusiveness of the two parts of this classification, for it made

improvement the end and the test, while it proclaimed liberty to be the

means. Every thinker now perceives that the strongest and most durable

influences in every western society lead in the direction of democracy,

and tend with more or less rapidity to throw the control of social

organisation into the hands of numerical majorities. There are many

people who believe that if you only make the ruling body big enough, it

is sure to be either very wise itself, or very eager to choose wise

leaders. Mr. Mill, as any one who is familiar with his writings is well

aware, did not hold this opinion. He had no more partiality for mob rule

than De Maistre or Goethe or Mr. Carlyle. He saw its evils more clearly

than any of these eminent men, because he had a more scientific eye, and

because he had had the invaluable training of a political administrator

on a large scale, and in a very responsible post. But he did not content

himself with seeing these evils, and he wasted no energy in passionate

denunciation of them, which he knew must prove futile. Guizot said of De

Tocqueville, that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Mr. Mill

was too penetrated by popular sympathies to be an aristocrat in De

Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which

the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without

chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started.

Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on

the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted

that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong

man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the

master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell

us.

Now Mr. Mill's doctrine laid down the main condition of finding your

hero; namely, that all ways should be left open to him, because no man,

nor majority of men, could possibly tell by which of these ways their

deliverers were from time to time destined to present themselves. Wits

have caricatured all this, by asking us whether by encouraging the tares

to grow, you give the wheat a better chance. This is as misleading as

such metaphors usually are. The doctrine of liberty rests on a faith

drawn from the observation of human progress, that though we know wheat

to be serviceable and tares to be worthless, yet there are in the great

seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and

not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity of

assuring ourselves. If you are too eager to pluck up the tares, you are

very likely to pluck up with them these untried possibilities of human

excellence, and you are, moreover, very likely to injure the growing

wheat as well. The demonstration of this lies in the recorded experience

of mankind.

Nor is this all. Mr. Mill's doctrine does not lend the least countenance

to the cardinal opinion of some writers in the last century, that the

only need of human character and of social institutions is to be let

alone. He never said that we were to leave the ground uncultivated, to

bring up whatever might chance to grow. On the contrary, the ground was

to be cultivated with the utmost care and knowledge, with a view to

prevent the growth of tares--but cultivated in a certain manner. You may

take the method of the Inquisition, of the more cruel of the Puritans,

of De Maistre, of Mr. Carlyle; or you may take Mr. Mill's method of

cultivation. According to the doctrine of Liberty, we are to devote

ourselves to prevention, as the surest and most wholesome mode of

extirpation. Persuade; argue; cherish virtuous example; bring up the

young in habits of right opinion and right motive; shape your social

arrangements so as to stimulate the best parts of character. By these

means you will gain all the advantages that could possibly have come of

heroes and legislative dragooning, as well as a great many more which

neither heroes nor legislative dragooning could ever have secured.

It is well with men, Mr. Mill said, moreover, in proportion as they

respect truth. Now they at once prove and strengthen their respect for

truth, by having an open mind to all its possibilities, while at the

same time they hold firmly to their own proved convictions, until they

hear better evidence to the contrary. There is no anarchy, nor

uncertainty, nor paralysing air of provisionalness in such a frame of

mind. So far is it from being fatal to loyalty or reverence, that it is

an indispensable part of the groundwork of the only loyalty that a wise

ruler or teacher would care to inspire--the loyalty springing from a

rational conviction that, in a field open to all comers, he is the best

man they can find. Only on condition of liberty without limit is the

ablest and most helpful of 'heroes' sure to be found; and only on

condition of liberty without limit are his followers sure to be worthy

of him. You must have authority, and yet must have obedience. The

noblest and deepest and most beneficent kind of authority is that which

rests on an obedience that is rational and spontaneous.

The same futile impatience which animates the political utterances of

Mr. Carlyle and his more weak-voiced imitators, takes another form in

men of a different training or temperament. They insist that if the

majority has the means of preventing vice by law, it is folly and

weakness not to resort to those means. The superficial attractiveness

of such a doctrine is obvious. The doctrine of liberty implies a broader

and a more patient view. It says:--Even if you could be sure that what

you take for vice is so--and the history of persecution shows how

careful you should be in this preliminary point--even then it is an

undoubted and, indeed, a necessary tendency of this facile repressive

legislation, to make those who resort to it neglect the more effective,

humane, and durable kinds of preventive legislation. You pass a law (if

you can) putting down drunkenness; there is a neatness in such a method

very attractive to fervid and impatient natures. Would you not have done

better to leave that law unpassed, and apply yourselves sedulously

instead to the improvement of the dwellings of the more drunken class,

to the provision of amusements that might compete with the ale-house, to

the extension and elevation of instruction, and so on? You may say that

this should be done, and yet the other should not be left undone; but,

as matter of fact and history, the doing of the one has always gone with

the neglect of the other, and ascetic law-making in the interests of

virtue has never been accompanied either by law-making or any other

kinds of activity for making virtue easier or more attractive. It is the

recognition how little punishment can do, that leaves men free to see

how much social prevention can do. I believe, then, that what seems to

the criminal lawyers and passionate philanthropists self-evident, is in

truth an illusion, springing from a very shallow kind of impatience,

heated in some of them by the addition of a cynical contempt for human

nature and the worth of human existence.

If people believe that the book of social or moral knowledge is now

completed, that we have turned over the last page and heard the last

word, much of the foundation of Mr. Mill's doctrine would disappear. But

those who hold this can hardly have much to congratulate themselves

upon. If it were so, and if governments were to accept the principle

that the only limits to the enforcement of the moral standard of the

majority are the narrow expediencies of each special case, without

reference to any deep and comprehensive principle covering all the

largest considerations, why, then, the society to which we ought to look

with most admiration and envy, is the Eastern Empire during the ninth

and tenth centuries, when the Byzantine system of a thorough

subordination of the spiritual power had fully consolidated itself!