Rose had by this time recovered his temper, and said, “It was rather crude, I admit.  But what I meant was that if a man feels that all opinions are of equal value, he must give full weight to all opinions.  The doctrinaire Liberal seems to me to be just as much inclined to tyrannise as the doctrinaire Tory, and to use his authority on the side of suppression when it is convenient to do so, and against all his own principles.”

“I don’t think that is quite fair,” said Father Payne.  “You must have a working system; you can’t try everyone’s experiments.  All that the Liberal says is, ‘Persuade us if you can.’  Pure Liberalism would be anarchy, just as pure Toryism would be tyranny.  Both are intolerable.  But just as the Liberal has to compromise and say, ’This may not be the ultimate theory of the Government, but meanwhile the world has to be governed,’ so the Tory has to compromise, if a large majority of the people say, ’We will not be governed by a minority for their interest; we will be governed for our own.’  The parliamentary vote is just a way of avoiding civil war; you can’t always resort to force, so you resort to arbitration.  But why the Liberal position is on the whole the stronger is because it says frankly, ’If you Tories can persuade the nation to ask you to govern it, we will obey you.’  The weakness of the Tory position is that it has to make exactly the same concessions, while it claims to be inspired by a divine sort of knowledge as to what is just and right.  I personally mistrust all intuitions which lead to tyranny.  Of course, the weakness of the whole affair is that the man who believes in democracy has to assume that all have equal rights; that would be fair enough if all people were born equal in character and ability, and influence and wealth.  But that isn’t the case; and so the Liberal says, ’Democracy is a bad system perhaps, but it is the only system,’ and it is fairer to maintain that everyone who gets into the world has as good a right as anyone else to be there, than it is to say, ’Some people have a right to manage the world and some have only a duty to obey.’  Both represent a side of the truth, but neither represents the whole truth.  At worst Liberalism is a combination of the weak against the strong, and Toryism a combination of the strong against the weak!  I personally wish the weak to have a chance; but what we all really desire is to be governed by the wise and good, and my hope for the world is that the quality of it is improving.  I want the weak to become sensible and self-restrained, and the strong to become unselfish and disinterested.  It is generosity that I want to see increase—­it is the finest of all qualities—­the desire, I mean to serve others, to admire, to sympathise, to share, to rejoice, in other people’s happiness.  That would solve all our difficulties.”

“Yes, of course,” said Rose.  “But I would like to go back again, and say that what I was praising was consistency.”