In these ways, then, compromise may mean, not acquiescence in an instalment, on the ground that the time is not ripe to yield us more than an instalment, but either the acceptance of the instalment as final, followed by the virtual abandonment of hope and effort; or else it may mean a mistaken reversal of direction, which augments the distance that has ultimately to be traversed.  In either of these senses, the small reform may become the enemy of the great one.  But a right conception of political method, based on a rightly interpreted experience of the conditions on which societies unite progress with order, leads the wise conservative to accept the small change, lest a worse thing befall him, and the wise innovator to seize the chance of a small improvement, while incessantly working in the direction of great ones.  The important thing is that throughout the process neither of them should lose sight of his ultimate ideal; nor fail to look at the detail from the point of view of the whole; nor allow the near particular to bulk so unduly large as to obscure the general and distant.

If the process seems intolerably slow, we may correct our impatience by looking back upon the past.  People seldom realise the enormous period of time which each change in men’s ideas requires for its full accomplishment.  We speak of these changes with a peremptory kind of definiteness, as if they had covered no more than the space of a few years.  Thus we talk of the time of the Reformation, as we might talk of the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Duties.  Yet the Reformation is the name for a movement of the mind of northern Europe, which went on for three centuries.  Then if we turn to that still more momentous set of events, the rise and establishment of Christianity, one might suppose from current speech that we could fix that within a space of half a century or so.  Yet it was at least four hundred years before all the foundations of that great superstructure of doctrine and organisation were completely laid.  Again, to descend to less imposing occurrences, the transition in the Eastern Empire from the old Roman system of national organisation to that other system to which we give the specific name of Byzantine,—­this transition, so infinitely less important as it was than either of the two other movements, yet occupied no less than a couple of hundred years.  The conditions of speech make it indispensable for us to use definite and compendious names for movements that were both tardy and complex.  We are forced to name a long series of events as if they were a single event.  But we lose the reality of history, we fail to recognise one of the most striking aspects of human affairs, and above all we miss that most invaluable practical lesson, the lesson of patience, unless we remember that the great changes of history took up long periods of time which, when measured by the little life of a man, are almost colossal, like the vast changes of geology.  We know how