Our thesis is this.  In the positive endeavour to realise an opinion, to convert a theory into practice, it may be, and very often is, highly expedient to defer to the prejudices of the majority, to move very slowly, to bow to the conditions of the status quo, to practise the very utmost sobriety, self-restraint, and conciliatoriness.  The mere expression of opinion, in the next place, the avowal of dissent from received notions, the refusal to conform to language which implies the acceptance of such notions,—­this rests on a different footing.  Here the reasons for respecting the wishes and sentiments of the majority are far less strong, though, as we shall presently see, such reasons certainly exist, and will weigh with all well-considering men.  Finally, in the formation of an opinion as to the abstract preferableness of one course of action over another, or as to the truth or falsehood or right significance of a proposition, the fact that the majority of one’s contemporaries lean in the other direction is naught, and no more than dust in the balance.  In making up our minds as to what would be the wisest line of policy if it were practicable, we have nothing to do with the circumstance that it is not practicable.  And in settling with ourselves whether propositions purporting to state matters of fact are trim or not, we have to consider how far they are conformable to the evidence.  We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace which they would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if they were taken as true.

A nominal assent to this truth will be instantly given even by those who in practice systematically disregard it.  The difficulty of transforming that nominal assent into a reality is enormous in such a community as ours.  Of all societies since the Roman Republic, and not even excepting the Roman Republic, England has been the most emphatically and essentially political.  She has passed through military phases and through religious phases, but they have been transitory, and the great central stream of national life has flowed in political channels.  The political life has been stronger than any other, deeper, wider, more persistent, more successful.  The wars which built up our far-spreading empire were not waged with designs of military conquest; they were mostly wars for a market.  The great spiritual emancipation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries figures in our history partly as an accident, partly as an intrigue, partly as a raid of nobles in search of spoil.  It was hardly until the reformed doctrine became associated with analogous ideas and corresponding precepts in government, that people felt at home with it, and became really interested in it.