s overlooked by the
thinkers who uphold coercion against liberty, as a saving social
principle. Every act of coercion directed against an opinion or a way of
living is in so far calculated to lessen the quantity of conscience in
the society where such acts are practised. Of course, where ways of
living interfere with the lawful rights of others, where they are not
strictly self-regarding in all their details, it is necessary to force
the dissidents, however strong may be their conscientious sentiment. The
evil of attenuating that sentiment is smaller than the evil of allowing
one set of persons to realise their own notions of happiness, at the
expense of all the rest of the world. But where these notions can be
realised without unlawful interference of that kind, then the forcible
hindrance of such realisation is a direct weakening of the force and
amount of conscience on which the community may count. There is one
memorable historic case to illustrate this. Lewis XIV., in revoking the
Edict of Nantes, and the author of the still more cruel law of 1724, not
only violently drove out multitudes of the most scrupulous part of the
French nation; they virtually offered the most tremendous bribes to
those of less stern resolution, to feign conversion to the orthodox
faith. This was to treat conscience as a thing of mean value. It was to
scatter to the wind with both hands the moral resources of the
community. And who can fail to see the strength which would have been
given to France in her hour of storm, a hundred years after the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, if her protestant sons, fortified by
the training in the habits of individual responsibility which
protestantism involves, had only been there to aid?

This consideration brings us to a new side of the discussion. We may
seem to have been unconsciously arguing as strongly in favour of a
vigorous social conservatism as of a self-asserting spirit of social
improvement. All that we have been saying may appear to cut both ways.
If the innovator should decline to practise silence or reserve, why
should the possessor of power be less uncompromising, and why should he
not impose silence by force? If the heretic ought to be uncompromising
in expressing his opinions, and in acting upon them, in the fulness of
his conviction that they are right, why should not the orthodox be
equally uncompromising in his resolution to stamp out the heretical
notions and unusual ways of liv