'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 principlesan 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]]