On Compromise | Page 8

since these cannot be combated by means drawn from the
very causes which produce them, it would often be a much stronger recommendation of
some practical arrangement that it does not follow from what is called the general
principle of the government, than that it does,'[2]
The English feeling for compromise is on its better side the result of a shrewd and
practical, though informal, recognition of a truth which the writer has here expressed in
terms of Method. The disregard which the political action of France has repeatedly
betrayed of a principle really so important has hitherto strengthened our own regard for it,
until it has not only made us look on its importance as exclusive and final, but has
extended our respect for the right kind of compromise to wrong and injurious kinds.
A minor event, which now looks much less important than it did not many years ago, but
which still had real influence in deteriorating moral judgment, was the career of a late
sovereign of France. Some apparent advantages followed for a season from a rule which
had its origin in a violent and perfidious usurpation, and which was upheld by all the arts
of moral corruption, political enervation, and military repression. The advantages lasted
long enough to create in this country a steady and powerful opinion that Napoleon the
Third's early crime was redeemed by the seeming prosperity which followed. The
shocking prematureness of this shallow condonation is now too glaringly visible for any
one to deny it. Not often in history has the great truth that 'morality is the nature of things'
received corroboration so prompt and timely. We need not commit ourselves to the
optimistic or sentimental hypothesis that wickedness always fares ill in the world, or on
the other hand that whoso hearkens diligently to the divine voice, and observes all the
commandments to do them, shall be blessed in his basket and his store and all the work of

his hand. The claims of morality to our allegiance, so far as its precepts are solidly
established, rest on the same positive base as our faith in the truth of physical laws. Moral
principles, when they are true, are at bottom only registered generalisations from
experience. They record certain uniformities of antecedence and consequence in the
region of human conduct Want of faith in the persistency of these uniformities is only a
little less fatuous in the moral order than a corresponding want of faith would instantly
disclose itself to be in the purely physical order. In both orders alike there is only too
much of this kind of fatuousness, this readiness to believe that for once in our favour the
stream shall flow up hill, that we may live in miasmatic air unpoisoned, that a
government may depress the energy, the self-reliance, the public spirit of its citizens, and
yet be able to count on these qualities whenever the government itself may have broken
down, and left the country to make the best of such resources as are left after so severe
and prolonged a drain. This is the sense in which morality is the nature of things. The
system of the Second Empire was in the same sense an immoral system. Unless all the
lessons of human experience were futile, and all the principles of political morality mere
articles of pedantry, such a system must inevitably bring disaster, as we might have seen
that it was sowing the seeds of disaster. Yet because the catastrophe lingered, opinion in
England began to admit the possibility of evil being for this once good, and to treat any
reference to the moral and political principles which condemned the imperial system, and
all systems like it, beyond hope or appeal, as simply the pretext of a mutinous or Utopian
impatience.
This, however, is only one of the more superficial influences which have helped and
fallen in with the working of profounder causes of weakened aspiration and impoverished
moral energy, and of the substitution of latitudinarian acquiescence and faltering
conviction for the whole-hearted assurance of better times. Of these deeper causes, the
most important in the intellectual development of the prevailing forms of thought and
sentiment is the growth of the Historic Method. Let us consider very shortly how the
abuse of this method, and an unauthorised extension and interpretation of its conclusions,
are likely to have had something to do with the enervation of opinion.
The Historic Method may be described as the comparison of the forms of an idea, or a
usage, or a belief, at any given time, with the earlier forms from which they were evolved,
or the later forms into which they were developed, and the establishment, from such a
comparison, of an ascending and descending order among the facts. It