or by anybody but ourselves.  Truth and wisdom have to bide their time, and then take their chance after all.  The most that the individual can do is to seek them for himself, even if he seek alone.  And if it is the most, it is also the least.  Yet in our present mood we seem not to feel this.  We misunderstand the considerations which should rightly lead us in practice to surrender some of what we desire, in order to secure the rest; and rightly make us acquiesce in a second-best course of action, in order to avoid stagnation or retrogression.  We misunderstand all this, and go on to suppose that there are the same grounds why we should in our own minds acquiesce in second-best opinions; why we should mix a little alloy of conventional expression with the too fine ore of conviction; why we should adopt beliefs that we suspect in our hearts to be of more than equivocal authenticity, but into whose antecedents we do not greatly care to inquire, because they stand so well with the general public.  This is compromise or economy or management of the first of the three kinds of which we are talking.  It is economy applied to the formation of opinion; compromise or management in making up one’s mind.

The lawfulness or expediency of it turns mainly, as with the other two kinds of compromise, upon the relative rights of the majority and the minority, and upon the respect which is owing from the latter to the former.  It is a very easy thing for people endowed with the fanatical temperament, or demoralised by the habit of looking at society exclusively from the juridical point of view, to insist that no respect at all, except the respect that arises from being too weak to have your own way, is due from either to the other.  This shallow and mischievous notion rests either on a misinterpretation of the experience of civilised societies, or else on nothing more creditable than an arbitrary and unreflecting temper.  Those who have thought most carefully and disinterestedly about the matter, are agreed that in advanced societies the expedient course is that no portion of the community should insist on imposing its own will upon any other portion, except in matters which are vitally connected with the maintenance of the social union.  The question where this vital connection begins is open to much discussion.  The line defining the sphere of legitimate interference may be drawn variously, whether at self-regarding acts, or in some other condition and element of conduct.  Wherever this line may be best taken, not only abstract speculation, but the practical and spontaneous tact of the world, has decided that there are limits, alike in the interest of majority and minority, to the rights of either to disturb the other.  In other words, it is expedient in certain affairs that the will of the majority should be absolutely binding, while in affairs of a different order it should count for nothing, or as nearly nothing, as the sociable dependence of a man on his fellows will permit.