On Compromise | Page 3

opinion might have turned aside; by making no allowances, respecting no motives,
and recognising none of those qualifying principles, which are nothing less than
necessary to make his own principle true and fitting in a given society. The interesting
question in connection with compromise obviously turns upon the placing of the
boundary that divides wise suspense in forming opinions, wise reserve in expressing
them, and wise tardiness in trying to realise them, from unavowed disingenuousness and
self-illusion, from voluntary dissimulation, and from indolence and pusillanimity. These
are the three departments or provinces of compromise. Our subject is a question of
boundaries.[1] And this question, being mainly one of time and circumstance, may be
most satisfactorily discussed in relation to the time and the circumstances which we know
best, or at least whose deficiencies and requirements are most pressingly visible to us.
Though England counts her full share of fearless truth-seekers in most departments of
inquiry, yet there is on the whole no weakening, but a rather marked confirmation, of
what has become an inveterate national characteristic, and has long been recognised as
such; a profound distrust, namely, of all general principles; a profound dislike both of
much reference to them, and of any disposition to invest them with practical authority;
and a silent but most pertinacious measurement of philosophic truths by political tests. 'It
is not at all easy, humanly speaking,' says one who has tried the experiment, 'to wind an
Englishman up to the level of dogma.' The difficulty has extended further than the dogma
of theology. The supposed antagonism between expediency and principle has been
pressed further and further away from the little piece of true meaning that it ever could be
rightly allowed to have, until it has now come to signify the paramount wisdom of
counting the narrow, immediate, and personal expediency for everything, and the whole,
general, ultimate, and completed expediency for nothing. Principle is only another name
for a proposition stating the terms of one of these larger expediencies. When principle is
held in contempt, or banished to the far dreamland of the philosopher and the student,
with an affectation of reverence that in a materialist generation is in truth the most
overweening kind of contempt, this only means that men are thinking much of the
interests of to-day, and little of the more ample interests of the many days to come. It
means that the conditions of the time are unfriendly to the penetration and the breadth of
vision which disclose to us the whole range of consequences that follow on certain kinds
of action or opinion, and unfriendly to the intrepidity and disinterestedness which make

us willing to sacrifice our own present ease or near convenience, in the hope of securing
higher advantages for others or for ourselves in the future.
Let us take politics, for example. What is the state of the case with us, if we look at
national life in its broadest aspect? A German has his dream of a great fatherland which
shall not only be one and consolidated, but shall in due season win freedom for itself, and
be as a sacred hearth whence others may borrow the warmth of freedom and order for
themselves. A Spaniard has his vision either of militant loyalty to God and the saints and
the exiled line of his kings, or else of devotion to the newly won liberty and to the raising
up of his fallen nation. An American, in the midst of the political corruption which for the
moment obscures the great democratic experiment, yet has his imagination kindled by the
size and resources of his land, and his enthusiasm fired by the high destinies which he
believes to await its people in the centuries to come. A Frenchman, republican or royalist,
with all his frenzies and 'fool-fury' of red or white, still has his hope and dream and
aspiration, with which to enlarge his life and lift him on an ample pinion out from the
circle of a poor egoism. What stirs the hope and moves the aspiration of our Englishman?
Surely nothing either in the heavens above or on the earth beneath. The English are as a
people little susceptible in the region of the imagination. But they have done good work
in the world, acquired a splendid historic tradition of stout combat for good causes,
founded a mighty and beneficent empire; and they have done all this notwithstanding
their deficiencies of imagination. Their lands have been the home of great and forlorn
causes, though they could not always follow the transcendental flights of their foreign
allies and champions. If Englishmen were not strong in imagination, they were what is
better and surer, strong in their hold of the great emancipating principles. What great
political cause, her own