And then, as we have said, one must remember the stuff of which life is made.  One must consider what an overwhelming preponderance of the most tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be absorbed between material cares and the solicitude of the affections.  It is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one’s time, because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs, and slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it.  Men and women have to live.  The task for most of them is arduous enough to make them well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as they find in the use and wont of daily existence.  To insist on a whole community being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new ideas, which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative intelligence of the time,—­this, even if it were a possible process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social dissolution.

‘It cannot be too emphatically asserted,’ as has been said by one of the most influential of modern thinkers, ’that this policy of compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs, which especially characterises English life, is a policy essential to a society going through the transitions caused by continued growth and development.  Ideas and institutions proper to a past social state, but incongruous with the new social state that has grown out of it, surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with these new ideas and institutions—­necessarily furnish elements of contradiction in men’s thoughts and deeds.  And yet, as for the carrying on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a normal development.’[27]

Yet we must not press this argument, and the state of feeling that belongs to it, further than they may be fairly made to go.  The danger in most natures lies on this side, for on this side our love of ease works, and our prejudices.  The writer in the passage we have just quoted is describing compromise as a natural state of things, the resultant of divergent forces.  He is not professing to define its conditions or limits as a practical duty.  Nor is there anything in his words, or in the doctrine of social evolution of which he is the most elaborate and systematic expounder, to favour that deliberate sacrifice of truth, either in search or in expression, against which our two previous chapters were meant to protest.[28] When Mr. Spencer talks of a new social state establishing its own ideas, of course he means, and can only mean, that men and women establish their own ideas, and to do that, it is obvious that they must at one time or another have conceived them without any special friendliness of reference to the old ideas, which they were in the fulness of time to supersede.  Still less, of course, can a new social state ever establish its ideas, unless the persons who hold them confess them openly, and give to them an honest and effective adherence.