The hermit smiled, and said, ‘Hold your hands, good sirs, for a single moment, and use your remaining strength to exchange places and look at the opposite side of the shield.’
They obeyed his words, and found to their confusion that they had been fighting in a quarrel in which each was right and each wrong.
‘Father,’ they said, ‘we are fools. Grant us thy pardon for our folly and absolution for our sin.’
‘Absolution,’ said the hermit, ‘is soon granted for faults which arise from the innate tendency of poor human nature. Wiser and older men than you are prone to see only their own side of a question. Come, then, with me to my humble hermitage; there will I dress your wounds and offer you my frugal fare; happy if from this lesson you may learn for the rest of your lives, before indulging in vehement assertions and proceeding to violent extremities, to “look at the other side of the shield.”’
The application of this fable to the polarity of politics will be obvious to every intelligent reader. As the earth is kept in its orbit by the due balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces, so is every civilised society held together by the opposite influences of conservative and progressive tendencies. The conservative tendency may be likened to the centripetal force which binds the mass together, while the progressive one resembles that centrifugal force which prevents it from being concentrated in a rigid and inert central body without life or motion. As Herbert Spencer truly says, ‘from antagonistic social tendencies there always results not a medium state, but a rhythm between opposite states. Now the one greatly preponderates, and presently, by reaction, there comes a preponderance of the other.’ So it is with the antagonism of conservative and liberal tendencies. In the societies of the ancient world, and to the present day in the East, the conservative tendency unduly preponderates, and they crystallise into inert masses in the form of despotisms, and of sacerdotal or administrative hierarchies. At times the pent-up forces which make for change accumulate, and, as in the French Revolution, explode with destructive violence, shattering the old and bringing in new eras. But unless the balance between liberty and order is tolerably preserved in the individual citizens whose aggregate forms the society, after a period more or less prolonged of violent oscillations they crystallise anew into fresh forms, in which another military dynasty, or it may be administrative centralisation under the name of a republic, again asserts the preponderance of the centripetal force.
The happiest nations are those in which the individual character of individual citizens supplies the requisite balance. An ideal society is one in which every citizen is at the same time liberal and conservative; law-abiding, and yet with a strong instinct for liberty of thought and action, for progress and for individual independence. It is among the Teutonic races, especially when they are placed in favourable conditions as in new countries, or in old countries where for ages
Freedom has widened slowly down,
From precedent to precedent,
that this happy ideal is most nearly realised. Hence it is that these races are more and more coming to the front and surviving in the struggle for existence.