man
without harming his neighbours, the time has always come for the
realisation of an idea. When the change in way of living or in
institution is one which requires the assent and co-operation of numbers
of people, it may clearly be a matter for question whether men enough
are ready to yield assent and co-operation. But the expression of the
necessity of the change and the grounds of it, though it may not always
be appropriate, can never be premature, and for these reasons. The fact
of a new idea having come to one man is a sign that it is in the air.
The innovator is as much the son of his generation as the conservative.
Heretics have as direct a relation to antecedent conditions as the
orthodox. Truth, said Bacon, has been rightly named the daughter of
Time. The new idea does not spring up uncaused and by miracle. If it has
come to me, there must be others to whom it has only just missed coming.
If I have found my way to the light, there must be others groping after
it very close in my neighbourhood. My discovery is their goal. They are
prepared to receive the new truth, which they were not prepared to find
for themselves. The fact that the mass are not yet ready to receive, any
more than to find, is no reason why the possessor of the new truth
should run to hide under a bushel the candle which has been lighted for
him. If the time has not come for them, at least it has come for him. No
man can ever know whether his neighbours are ready for change or not. He
has all the following certainties, at least:--that he himself is ready
for the change; that he believes it would be a good and beneficent one;
that unless some one begins the work of preparation, assuredly there
will be no consummation; and that if he declines to take a part in the
matter, there can be no reason why every one else in turn should not
decline in like manner, and so the work remain for ever unperformed. The
compromiser who blinds himself to all those points, and acts just as if
the truth were not in him, does for ideas with which he agrees, the very
thing which the acute persecutor does for ideas which he dislikes--he
extinguishes beginnings and kills the germs.

The consideration on which so many persons rely, that an existing
institution, though destined to be replaced by a better, performs useful
functions provisionally, is really not to the point. It is an excellent
reason why the institution should not be removed or fundamentally
modified, un