gauged by such questions as whether the Slave States had or had not a constitutional right to establish an independent government; whether the Free States were animated by philanthropy or by love of empire; whether it was to the political advantage of England that the American Union should be divided and consequently weakened.  Such questions were not necessarily improper in themselves, and we can imagine circumstances in which they might be not only proper but decisive.  But, the circumstances being what they were, the narrower expediencies of ordinary politics were outweighed by one of those supreme and indefeasible expediencies which are classified as moral.  These are, in other words, the higher, wider, more binding, and transcendent part of the master art of social wellbeing.

Here was only one illustration of the growing tendency to substitute the narrowest political point of view for all the other ways of regarding the course of human affairs, and to raise the limitations which practical exigencies may happen to set to the application of general principles, into the very place of the principles themselves.  Nor is the process of deteriorating conviction confined to the greater or noisier transactions of nations.  It is impossible that it should be so.  That process is due to causes which affect the mental temper an a whole, and pour round us an atmosphere that enervates our judgment from end to end, not more in politics than in morality, and not more in morality than in philosophy, in art, and in religion.  Perhaps this tendency never showed itself more offensively than when the most important newspaper in the country criticised our great naturalist’s scientific speculations as to the descent of man, from the point of view of property, intelligence, and a stake in the country, and severely censured him for revealing his particular zoological conclusions to the general public, at a moment when the sky of Paris was red with the incendiary flames of the Commune.  It would be hard to reduce the transformation of all truth into a subordinate department of daily politics, to a more gross and unseemly absurdity.

The consequences of such a transformation, of putting immediate social convenience in the first place, and respect for truth in the second, are seen, as we have said, in a distinct and unmistakable lowering of the level of national life; a slack and lethargic quality about public opinion; a growing predominance of material, temporary, and selfish aims, over those which are generous, far-reaching, and spiritual; a deadly weakening of intellectual conclusiveness, and clear-shining moral illumination, and, lastly, of a certain stoutness of self-respect for which England was once especially famous.  A plain categorical proposition is becoming less and less credible to average minds.  Or at least the slovenly willingness to hold two directly contradictory propositions at one and the same time is becoming more and more common.  In religion, morals, and politics, the suppression of your true opinion, if not the positive profession of what you hold to be a false opinion, is hardly ever counted a vice, and not seldom even goes for virtue and solid wisdom.  One is conjured to respect the beliefs of others, but forbidden to claim the same respect for one’s own.