of personal liberty of thought, expression, or action, which is the breeding-place of progressive life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion.  In proportion as the material interests are less clearly affected injuriously, a cause is removed into the region of moral suasion, and loses political vigour.  Religious issues constitute the extreme of political action without regard to material interests, wars of conversion being their ultimate, and they are more potent with less developed races.  For this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere of fraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social institutions and habits, which political action may sometimes favour as in public charities, but which usually rely on other resources for their support.  On occasions of crisis, however, a great idea may marshal the whole community in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so championed under democracy is the spiritual right of man.

But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in that principle of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in that substitution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, which democracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the authority of a delegated and representative liberty.  Persuasion, in its moral form, outside of politics,—­which is so largely resorted to in a community that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man and decreed by him out of his own soul,—­need not be enlarged upon here; but in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and will necessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, since law thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itself no longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it is adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny, recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as that has historically been.  But outside of this refinement of thought in the analysis, the fact that the normal attitude of any cause in a democracy is that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before it can impose itself as the will of the State on its citizens, marks a regard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highest consequence in State affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit upon the rest of life.

That portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, and remains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the nature of society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all in turn.  Those rights are more respected under democracy than in any other form of government.  The important question here, however, is not the conduct of the State toward an opposition in general, which is at one time composed of one element and at another time of a different element, and is