times, varies infinitely.  The immediate cause of the decline of a society in the order of morals is a decline in the quantity of its conscience, a deadening of its moral sensitiveness, and not a depravation of its theoretical ethics.  The Greeks became corrupt and enfeebled, not for lack of ethical science, but through the decay in the numbers of those who were actually alive to the reality and force of ethical obligations.  Mahometans triumphed over Christians in the East and in Spain—­if we may for a moment isolate moral conditions from the rest of the total circumstances—­not because their scheme of duty was more elevated or comprehensive, but because their respect for duty was more strenuous and fervid.

The great importance of leaving this priceless element in a community as free, as keen, and as active as possible, is overlooked by the thinkers who uphold coercion against liberty, as a saving social principle.  Every act of coercion directed against an opinion or a way of living is in so far calculated to lessen the quantity of conscience in the society where such acts are practised.  Of course, where ways of living interfere with the lawful rights of others, where they are not strictly self-regarding in all their details, it is necessary to force the dissidents, however strong may be their conscientious sentiment.  The evil of attenuating that sentiment is smaller than the evil of allowing one set of persons to realise their own notions of happiness, at the expense of all the rest of the world.  But where these notions can be realised without unlawful interference of that kind, then the forcible hindrance of such realisation is a direct weakening of the force and amount of conscience on which the community may count.  There is one memorable historic case to illustrate this.  Lewis XIV., in revoking the Edict of Nantes, and the author of the still more cruel law of 1724, not only violently drove out multitudes of the most scrupulous part of the French nation; they virtually offered the most tremendous bribes to those of less stern resolution, to feign conversion to the orthodox faith.  This was to treat conscience as a thing of mean value.  It was to scatter to the wind with both hands the moral resources of the community.  And who can fail to see the strength which would have been given to France in her hour of storm, a hundred years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, if her protestant sons, fortified by the training in the habits of individual responsibility which protestantism involves, had only been there to aid?

This consideration brings us to a new side of the discussion.  We may seem to have been unconsciously arguing as strongly in favour of a vigorous social conservatism as of a self-asserting spirit of social improvement.  All that we have been saying may appear to cut both ways.  If the innovator should decline to practise silence or reserve, why should the possessor of power be less uncompromising, and