ctices and new
ideas, which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced
speculative intelligence of the time,--this, even if it were a possible
process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social
dissolution.

'It cannot be too emphatically asserted,' as has been said by one of
the most influential of modern thinkers, 'that this policy of
compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs, which
especially characterises English life, is a policy essential to a
society going through the transitions caused by continued growth and
development. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social state, but
incongruous with the new social state that has grown out of it,
surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and
disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and
institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with
these new ideas and institutions--necessarily furnish elements of
contradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as for the carrying
on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not
ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a
normal development.'[27]

Yet we must not press this argument, and the state of feeling that
belongs to it, further than they may be fairly made to go. The danger in
most natures lies on this side, for on this side our love of ease
works, and our prejudices. The writer in the passage we have just quoted
is describing compromise as a natural state of things, the resultant of
divergent forces. He is not professing to define its conditions or
limits as a practical duty. Nor is there anything in his words, or in
the doctrine of social evolution of which he is the most elaborate and
systematic expounder, to favour that deliberate sacrifice of truth,
either in search or in expression, against which our two previous
chapters were meant to protest.[28] When Mr. Spencer talks of a new
social state establishing its own ideas, of course he means, and can
only mean, that men and women establish their own ideas, and to do that,
it is obvious that they must at one time or another have conceived them
without any special friendliness of reference to the old ideas, which
they were in the fulness of time to supersede. Still less, of course,
can a new social state ever establish its ideas, unless the persons who
hold them confess them openly, and give to th