This dread of the categorical proposition might be creditable, if it sprang from attachment to a very high standard of evidence, or from a deep sense of the relative and provisional quality of truth.  There might even be a plausible defence set up for it, if it sprang from that formulated distrust of the energetic rational judgment in comparison with the emotional, affective, contemplative parts of man, which underlies the various forms of religious mysticism.  If you look closely into our present mood, it is seen to be the product mainly and above all of a shrinking deference to the status quo, not merely as having a claim not to be lightly dealt with, which every serious man concedes, but as being the last word and final test of truth and justice.  Physical science is allowed to be the sphere of accurate reasoning and distinct conclusions, but in morals and politics, instead of admitting that these subjects have equally a logic of their own, we silently suspect all first principles, and practically deny the strict inferences from demonstrated premisses.  Faith in the soundness of given general theories of right and wrong melts away before the first momentary triumph of wrong, or the first passing discouragement in enforcing right.

Our robust political sense, which has discovered so many of the secrets of good government, which has given us freedom with order, and popular administration without corruption, and unalterable respect for law along with indelible respect for individual right, this, which has so long been our strong point, is fast becoming our weakness and undoing.  For the extension of the ways of thinking which are proper in politics, to other than political matter, means at the same time the depravation of the political sense itself.  Not only is social expediency effacing the many other points of view that men ought to take of the various facts of life and thought:  the idea of social expediency itself is becoming a dwarfed and pinched idea.  Ours is the country where love of constant improvement ought to be greater than anywhere else, because fear of revolution is less.  Yet the art of politics is growing to be as meanly conceived as all the rest At elections the national candidate has not often a chance against the local candidate, nor the man of a principle against the man of a class.  In parliament we are admonished on high authority that ’the policy of a party is not the carrying out of the opinion of any section of it, but the general consensus of the whole,’ which seems to be a hierophantic manner of saying that the policy of a party is one thing, and the principle which makes it a party is another thing, and that men who care very strongly about anything are to surrender that and the hope of it, for the sake of succeeding in something about which they care very little or not at all.  This is our modern way of giving politicians heart for their voyage, of inspiring them with resoluteness and self-respect, with confidence in the worth of their cause and enthusiasm for its success.  Thoroughness is a mistake, and nailing your flag to the mast a bit of delusive heroics.  Think wholly of to-day, and not at all of to-morrow.  Beware of the high and hold fast to the safe.  Dismiss conviction, and study general consensus.  No zeal, no faith, no intellectual trenchancy, but as much low-minded geniality and trivial complaisance as you please.