the whole world straightway to follow.  The first prolongs the duration of the empire of prejudice, and retards the arrival of improvement.  The second does his best to abbreviate the one, and to hasten and make definite the other, yet he does not insist on hurrying changes which, to be effective, would require the active support of numbers of persons not yet ripe for them.  It is legitimate compromise to say:—­’I do not expect you to execute this improvement, or to surrender that prejudice, in my time.  But at any rate it shall not be my fault if the improvement remains unknown or rejected.  There shall be one man at least who has surrendered the prejudice, and who does not hide that fact.’  It is illegitimate compromise to say:—­’I cannot persuade you to accept my truth; therefore I will pretend to accept your falsehood.’

That this distinction is as sound on the evolutional theory of society as on any other is quite evident.  It would be odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify.  When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition.  On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements.  It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so.  Progress depends upon tendencies and forces in a community.  But of these tendencies and forces, the organs and representatives must plainly be found among the men and women of the community, and cannot possibly be found anywhere else.  Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we were all to be cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation, we should awake to find ourselves in a greatly improved social state.  The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better.  Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a cause, but a law.  It explains the source, and marks the immovable limitations, of social energy.  But social energy itself can never be superseded either by evolution or by anything else.

The reproach of being impracticable and artificial attaches by rights not to those who insist on resolute, persistent, and uncompromising efforts to remove abuses, but to a very different class—­to those, namely, who are credulous enough to suppose that abuses and bad customs and wasteful ways of doing things will remove themselves.  This credulity, which is a cloak for indolence or ignorance or stupidity, overlooks the fact that there are bodies of men, more or less numerous, attached by every selfish interest they have to the maintenance of these abusive customs.  ‘A plan,’ says Bentham, ’may be said to be too good to be practicable, where, without adequate inducement in the shape of personal interest, it requires