ideal, if it is not to make a guide for practice and a landmark in dealing with the real.  A man’s loftiest and most ideal notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, shall we not say, senseless kind, if he can never see how to take a single step that may tend in the slightest degree towards making them more real.  If an ideal has no point of contact with what exists, it is probably not much more than the vapid outcome of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence.  If it has such a point of contact, then there is sure to be something which a man can do towards the fulfilment of his hopes.  He cannot substitute a new national religion for the old, but he can at least do something to prevent people from supposing that the adherents of the old are more numerous than they really are, and something to show them that good ideas are not all exhausted by the ancient forms.  He cannot transform a monarchy into a republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the debasing complaisance of the crowd.

’It is a very great mistake, said Burke, many years before the French Revolution is alleged, and most unreasonably alleged, to have alienated him from liberalism:  ’it is a very great mistake to imagine that mankind follow up practically any speculative principle, either of government or of freedom, as far as it will go in argument and logical illation.  All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.  We balance inconveniences; we give and take;—­we remit some rights that we may enjoy others....  Man acts from motives relative to his interests; and not on metaphysical speculations.[29] These are the words of wisdom and truth, if we can be sure that men will interpret them in all the fulness of their meaning, and not be content to take only that part of the meaning which falls in with the dictates of their own love of ease.  In France such words ought to be printed in capitals on the front of every newspaper, and written up in letters of burnished gold over each faction of the Assembly, and on the door of every bureau in the Administration.  In England they need a commentary which shall bring out the very simple truth, that compromise and barter do not mean the undisputed triumph of one set of principles.  Nor, on the other hand, do they mean the mutilation of both sets of principles, with a view to producing a tertium quid that shall involve the disadvantages of each, without securing the advantages of either.  What Burke means is that we ought never to press our ideas up to their remotest logical issues, without reference to the conditions in which we are applying them.  In politics we have an art.  Success in politics, as in every other art, obviously before all else implies both knowledge of the material with which we have to deal, and also such concession as is necessary to the qualities of the material.  Above all, in