“Yes, I think it may be fairly called dishonourable,” said Rose; “there is an obligation on a citizen to back up his Government.”

“Then I should feel that honour is a very complicated thing,” said Father Payne.  “If a citizen thinks a treaty dishonourable, and if it is also dishonourable for him to repudiate it, it seems to me he is dishonourable whatever he does.  He is obliged to consent for the sake of honour to a dishonourable thing being done.  It seems to me perilously like a director of a firm having to condone fraudulent practices, because it is dishonourable to give his fellow-directors away.  It is this conflict between individual honour and public honour which puzzles me, and which makes me feel that honour isn’t a simple thing at all.  A high conception of private honour seems to me a very fine thing indeed.  I mean by it a profound hatred of anything false or cowardly or perfidious, and a loathing of anything insincere or treacherous.  That sort of proud and stainless chivalry seems to me to be about the brightest thing we can discern, and the furthest beauty we can recognise.  But honour seems also, according to you, to be a principle to which you can be committed by a majority of votes, whether you approve of it or not; and then it seems to me a merely detestable thing, if you can be bound by honour to acquiesce in something which you honestly believe to be base.  It seems to me a case of what Tennyson describes: 

  “’His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
  And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.’”

“But surely social obligations must often conflict with private beliefs,” said Rose.  “A nation or a society has got to act collectively, and a minority must be over-ridden.”

“I quite agree,” said Father Payne, “but why mix up honour with it at all?  I don’t object to a man who conscientiously dissents to some national move being told that he must lump it.  But if he is called dishonourable for dissenting, then honour does not seem to me to be a real word at all, but only a term of abuse for a man who objects to some concerted plan.  You can’t make a dishonest thing honest because a majority choose to do it—­at least I do not believe that morality is purely a matter of majorities, or that the dishonour of one century can become the honour of the next.  I am inclined to believe just the opposite.  I believe that the man who has so sensitive a conscience about what is honourable or not, that he is called a Quixotic fool by his contemporaries, is far more likely to be right than the coarser majority who only see that a certain course is expedient.  I should believe that he saw some truth of morality clearly which the rougher sort of minds did not see.  The saint—­call him what you like—­is only the man who stands higher up, and sees the sunrise before the people who stand lower down.”

“But everyone has a right to his own sense of honour,” said Rose.