why should he not impose silence by force?  If the heretic ought to be uncompromising in expressing his opinions, and in acting upon them, in the fulness of his conviction that they are right, why should not the orthodox be equally uncompromising in his resolution to stamp out the heretical notions and unusual ways of living, in the fulness of his conviction that they are thoroughly wrong?  To this question the answer is that the hollow kinds of compromise are as bad in the orthodox as in the heretical.  Truth has as much to gain from sincerity and thoroughness in one as in the other.  But the issue between the partisans of the two opposed schools turns upon the sense which we design to give to the process of stamping out.  Those who cling to the tenets of liberty limit the action of the majority, as of the minority, strictly to persuasion.  Those who dislike liberty, insist that earnestness of conviction justifies either a majority or a minority in using not persuasion only, but force.  I do not propose here to enter into the great question which Mr. Mill pressed anew upon the minds of this generation.  His arguments are familiar to every reader, and the conclusion at which he arrived is almost taken for a postulate in the present essay.[31] The object of these chapters is to reiterate the importance of self-assertion, tenacity, and positiveness of principle.  The partisan of coercion will argue that this thesis is on one side of it a justification of persecution, and other modes of interfering with new opinions and new ways of living by force, and the strong arm of the law, and whatever other energetic means of repression may be at command.  If the minority are to be uncompromising alike in seeking and realising what they take for truth, why not the majority?  Now this implies two propositions.  It is the same as to say, first, that earnestness of conviction is not to be distinguished from a belief in our own infallibility; second, that faith in our infallibility is necessarily bound up with intolerance.

Neither of these propositions is true.  Let us take them in turn.  Earnestness of conviction is perfectly compatible with a sense of liability to error.  This has been so excellently put by a former writer that we need not attempt to better his exposition.  ’Every one must, of course, think his own opinions right; for if he thought them wrong, they would no longer be his opinions:  but there is a wide difference between regarding ourselves as infallible, and being firmly convinced of the truth of our creed.  When a man reflects on any particular doctrine, he may be impressed with a thorough conviction of the improbability or even impossibility of its being false:  and so he may feel with regard to all his other opinions, when he makes them objects of separate contemplation.  And yet when he views them in the aggregate, when he reflects that not a single being on the earth holds collectively the same, when he looks at the past history and present state