On Compromise

by John Morley

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.