nstitution whose death-warrant you pretend to be signing with the
other.

In a different way the second possible evil of a small reform may be
equally mischievous--where the small reform is represented as settling
the question. The mischief here is not that it takes us out of the
progressive course, as in the case we have just been considering, but
that it sets men's minds in a posture of contentment, which is not
justified by the amount of what has been done, and which makes it all
the harder to arouse them to new effort when the inevitable time
arrives.

In these ways, then, compromise may mean, not acquiescence in an
instalment, on the ground that the time is not ripe to yield us more
than an instalment, but either the acceptance of the instalment as
final, followed by the virtual abandonment of hope and effort; or else
it may mean a mistaken reversal of direction, which augments the
distance that has ultimately to be traversed. In either of these senses,
the small reform may become the enemy of the great one. But a right
conception of political method, based on a rightly interpreted
experience of the conditions on which societies unite progress with
order, leads the wise conservative to accept the small change, lest a
worse thing befall him, and the wise innovator to seize the chance of a
small improvement, while incessantly working in the direction of great
ones. The important thing is that throughout the process neither of them
should lose sight of his ultimate ideal; nor fail to look at the detail
from the point of view of the whole; nor allow the near particular to
bulk so unduly large as to obscure the general and distant.

If the process seems intolerably slow, we may correct our impatience by
looking back upon the past. People seldom realise the enormous period of
time which each change in men's ideas requires for its full
accomplishment. We speak of these changes with a peremptory kind of
definiteness, as if they had covered no more than the space of a few
years. Thus we talk of the time of the Reformation, as we might talk of
the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Duties. Yet the Reformation is
the name for a movement of the mind of northern Europe, which went on
for three centuries. Then if we turn to that still more momentous set
of events, the rise and establishment of Christianity, one might suppose
from current speech that we could fix that within a space of half a
century or so. Yet it was at le