On Compromise | Page 7

manner of saying that
the policy of a party is one thing, and the principle which makes it a party is another thing,
and that men who care very strongly about anything are to surrender that and the hope of
it, for the sake of succeeding in something about which they care very little or not at all.
This is our modern way of giving politicians heart for their voyage, of inspiring them
with resoluteness and self-respect, with confidence in the worth of their cause and
enthusiasm for its success. Thoroughness is a mistake, and nailing your flag to the mast a
bit of delusive heroics. Think wholly of to-day, and not at all of to-morrow. Beware of
the high and hold fast to the safe. Dismiss conviction, and study general consensus. No
zeal, no faith, no intellectual trenchancy, but as much low-minded geniality and trivial
complaisance as you please.
Of course, all these characteristics of our own society mark tendencies that are common
enough in all societies. They often spring from an indolence and enervation that besets a
certain number of people, however invigorating the general mental climate may be. What
we are now saying is that the general mental climate itself has, outside of the domain of
physical science, ceased to be invigorating; that, on the contrary, it fosters the more
inglorious predispositions of men, and encourages a native willingness, already so strong,
to acquiesce in a lazy accommodation with error, an ignoble economy of truth, and a
vicious compromise of the permanent gains of adhering to a sound general principle, for
the sake of the temporary gains of departing from it.
Without attempting an elaborate analysis of the causes that have brought about this
debilitation of mental tone, we may shortly remind ourselves of one or two facts in the
political history, in the intellectual history, and in the religious history of this generation,
which perhaps help us to understand a phenomenon that we have all so keen an interest
both in understanding and in modifying.
To begin with what lies nearest to the surface. The most obvious agency at work in the
present exaggeration of the political standard as the universal test of truth, is to be found
in some contemporary incidents. The influence of France upon England since the
revolution of 1848 has tended wholly to the discredit of abstract theory and general
reasoning among us, in all that relates to politics, morals, and religion. In 1848, not in
1789, questions affecting the fundamental structure and organic condition of the social
union came for the first time into formidable prominence. For the first time those
questions and the answers to them were stated in articulate formulas and distinct theories.
They were not merely written in books; they so fascinated the imagination and inflamed
the hopes of the time, that thousands of men were willing actually to go down into the
streets and to shed their blood for the realisation of their generous dream of a renovated

society. The same sight has been seen since, and even when we do not see it, we are
perfectly aware that the same temper is smouldering. Those were premature attempts to
convert a crude aspiration into a political reality, and to found a new social order on a
number of umcompromising deductions from abstract principles of the common weal.
They have had the natural effect of deepening the English dislike of a general theory,
even when such a theory did no more than profess to announce a remote object of desire,
and not the present goal of immediate effort.
It is not only the Socialists who are responsible for the low esteem into which a spirit of
political generalisation has fallen in other countries, in consequence of French experience.
Mr. Mill has described in a well-known passage the characteristic vice of the leaders of
all French parties, and not of the democratic party more than any other. 'The
commonplaces of politics in France,' he says, 'are large and sweeping practical maxims,
from which, as ultimate premisses, men reason downwards to particular applications, and
this they call being logical and consistent. For instance, they are perpetually arguing that
such and such a measure ought to be adopted, because it is a consequence of the principle
on which the form of government is founded; of the principle of legitimacy, or the
principle of the sovereignty of the people. To which it may be answered that if these be
really practical principles, they must rest on speculative grounds; the sovereignty of the
people (for example) must be a right foundation for government, because a government
thus constituted tends to produce certain beneficial effects. Inasmuch, however, as no
government produces all possible beneficial effects, but all are attended with more or
fewer inconveniences; and