On Compromise Part 5

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 cla.s.s--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 cla.s.s 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 mult.i.tude 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 inst.i.tutions 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 const.i.tution 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 inst.i.tutions 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. n.o.body 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 const.i.tute 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 inst.i.tution, 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 inst.i.tution is one which requires the a.s.sent and co-operation of numbers of people, it may clearly be a matter for question whether men enough are ready to yield a.s.sent 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 ma.s.s 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, a.s.suredly 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 inst.i.tution, 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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. a.s.sume, 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 pa.s.s 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstance 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 inst.i.tution 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 abas.e.m.e.nt, 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 ign.o.ble 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 att.i.tude of contempt and dislike for these ign.o.ble 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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sent 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sembly, 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 inst.i.tution 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. a.s.suredly 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 inst.i.tutions, have always lingered just as long in face of their successors, and the compet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sing 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, a.s.sociation, aspiration. Hence, even while, in quality, sense of duty is a stationary factor, it is constantly changing in quant.i.ty. 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 quant.i.ty 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 circ.u.mstances--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 quant.i.ty 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 mult.i.tudes 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-a.s.serting 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-a.s.sertion, 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.surance in particular is tantamount by process of c.u.mulation 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 a.s.sured, has the best reason for relying on persuasion, and the strongest motive to thrust from him all temptations to use angry force. The subst.i.tution 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 a.n.a.logies 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 subst.i.tution 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 a.n.a.logies 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 cla.s.ses, 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 ill.u.s.tration of the impotence of moral ideas to override material circ.u.mstances; and we shall venture to place this ill.u.s.tration 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 pa.s.ses 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 serf.a.ge should be evolved from slavery, and free labour again from serf.a.ge, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 regime. 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 cla.s.ses 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 reconst.i.tution 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 regime.[34]

Nor is there any instance in history of mere opinion making a breach in the essential const.i.tution 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 a.s.similation 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 pa.s.sions rather than their interests, that all their pa.s.sions 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 n.o.bleness, 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 pa.s.sively 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 rea.s.sure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view,' etc.]

[Footnote 29: _Speech on Conciliation with America_.]

[Footnote 30: 'Toute enormite 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 reel avec les objets environnants. Le propre de certaines prunelles ardentes est de franchir du regard les intervalles et de les supprimer. Tantot c'est une idee qui r.e.t.a.r.de de plusieurs siecles, et que ces vigoureux esprits se figurent encore presente et vivante; tantot c'est une idee qui avance, et qu'ils croient incontinent realisable. M.

de Couaen etait ainsi; il voyait 1814 des 1804, et de la une superiorite; mais il jugeait 1814 possible des 1804 ou 1805, et de la tout un chimerique enta.s.s.e.m.e.nt.--Voila un point blanc a l'horizon, chacun jurerait que c'est un nuage. "C'est une montagne," dit le voyageur a l'oeil d'aigle; mais s'il ajoute: "Nous y arriverons ce soir, dans deux heures;" si, a chaque heure de marche, il crie avec emportement: "Nous y sommes," et le veut demontrer, il choque les voisins avec sa poutre, et donne l'avantage aux yeux moins percants et plus habitues a la plaine.'--Ste. Beuve's _Volupte_, 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 pa.s.sage:--'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 l.u.s.t, 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 G.o.d sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious.']