politics we have an art in which development depends upon small modifications.  That is the true side of the conservative theory.  To hurry on after logical perfection is to show one’s self ignorant of the material of that social structure with which the politician has to deal.  To disdain anything short of an organic change in thought or institution in infatuation.  To be willing to make such changes too frequently, even when they are possible, is foolhardiness.  That fatal French saying about small reforms being the worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly used, a formula of social ruin.

On the other hand, let us not forget that there is a sense in which this very saying is profoundly true.  A small and temporary improvement may really be the worst enemy of a great and permanent improvement, unless the first is made on the lines and in the direction of the second.  And so it may, if it be successfully palmed off upon a society as actually being the second.  In such a case as this, and our legislation presents instances of the kind, the small reform, if it be not made with reference to some large progressive principle and with a view to further extension of its scope, makes it all the more difficult to return to the right line and direction when improvement is again demanded.  To take an example which is now very familiar to us all.  The Education Act of 1870 was of the nature of a small reform.  No one pretends that it is anything approaching to a final solution of a complex problem.  But the government insisted, whether rightly or wrongly, that their Act was as large a measure as public opinion was at that moment ready to support.  At the same time it was clearly agreed among the government and the whole of the party at their backs, that at some time or other, near or remote, if public instruction was to be made genuinely effective, the private, voluntary, or denominational system would have to be replaced by a national system.  To prepare for this ultimate replacement was one of the points to be most steadily borne in mind, however slowly and tentatively the process might be conducted.  Instead of that, the authors of the Act deliberately introduced provisions for extending and strengthening the very system which will have eventually to be superseded.  They thus by their small reform made the future great reform the more difficult of achievement.  Assuredly this is not the compromise and barter, the give and take, which Burke intended.  What Burke means by compromise, and what every true statesman understands by it, is that it may be most inexpedient to meddle with an institution merely because it does not harmonise with ‘argument and logical illation.’  This is a very different thing from giving new comfort and strength with one hand, to an institution whose death-warrant you pretend to be signing with the other.

In a different way the second possible evil of a small reform may be equally mischievous—­where the small reform is represented as settling the question.  The mischief here is not that it takes us out of the progressive course, as in the case we have just been considering, but that it sets men’s minds in a posture of contentment, which is not justified by the amount of what has been done, and which makes it all the harder to arouse them to new effort when the inevitable time arrives.