Every discussion of the more fundamental principles of conduct must contain, expressly or by implication, some general theory of the nature and constitution of the social union.  Let us state in a few words that which seems to command the greatest amount both of direct and analogical evidence in our time.  It is perhaps all the more important to discuss our subject with immediate and express reference to this theory, because it has become in some minds a plea for a kind of philosophic indifference towards any policy of Thorough, as well as an excuse for systematic abstention from vigorous and downright courses of action.

A progressive society is now constantly and justly compared to a growing organism.  Its vitality in this aspect consists of a series of changes in ideas and institutions.  These changes arise spontaneously from the operation of the whole body of social conditions, external and internal.  The understanding and the affections and desires are always acting on the domestic, political, and economic ordering.  They influence the religious sentiment.  They touch relations with societies outside.  In turn they are constantly being acted on by all these elements.  In a society progressing in a normal and uninterrupted course, this play and interaction is the sign and essence of life.  It is, as we are so often told, a long process of new adaptations and re-adaptations; of the modification of tradition and usage by truer ideas and improved institutions.  There may be, and there are, epochs of rest, when this modification in its active and demonstrative shape slackens or ceases to be visible.  But even then the modifying forces are only latent.  Further progress depends on the revival of their energy, before there has been time for the social structure to become ossified and inelastic.  The history of civilisation is the history of the displacement of old conceptions by new ones more conformable to the facts.  It is the record of the removal of old institutions and ways of living, in favour of others of greater convenience and ampler capacity, at once multiplying and satisfying human requirements.

Now compromise, in view of the foregoing theory of social advance, may be of two kinds, and of these two kinds one is legitimate and the other not.  It may stand for two distinct attitudes of mind, one of them obstructive and the other not.  It may mean the deliberate suppression or mutilation of an idea, in order to make it congruous with the traditional idea or the current prejudice on the given subject, whatever that may be.  Or else it may mean a rational acquiescence in the fact that the bulk of your contemporaries are not yet prepared either to embrace the new idea, or to change their ways of living in conformity to it.  In the one case, the compromiser rejects the highest truth, or dissembles his own acceptance of it.  In the other, he holds it courageously for his ensign and device, but neither forces nor expects