ing, in the fulness of his conviction
that they are thoroughly wrong? To this question the answer is that the
hollow kinds of compromise are as bad in the orthodox as in the
heretical. Truth has as much to gain from sincerity and thoroughness in
one as in the other. But the issue between the partisans of the two
opposed schools turns upon the sense which we design to give to the
process of stamping out. Those who cling to the tenets of liberty limit
the action of the majority, as of the minority, strictly to persuasion.
Those who dislike liberty, insist that earnestness of conviction
justifies either a majority or a minority in using not persuasion only,
but force. I do not propose here to enter into the great question which
Mr. Mill pressed anew upon the minds of this generation. His arguments
are familiar to every reader, and the conclusion at which he arrived is
almost taken for a postulate in the present essay.[31] The object of
these chapters is to reiterate the importance of self-assertion,
tenacity, and positiveness of principle. The partisan of coercion will
argue that this thesis is on one side of it a justification of
persecution, and other modes of interfering with new opinions and new
ways of living by force, and the strong arm of the law, and whatever
other energetic means of repression may be at command. If the minority
are to be uncompromising alike in seeking and realising what they take
for truth, why not the majority? Now this implies two propositions. It
is the same as to say, first, that earnestness of conviction is not to
be distinguished from a belief in our own infallibility; second, that
faith in our infallibility is necessarily bound up with intolerance.

Neither of these propositions is true. Let us take them in turn.
Earnestness of conviction is perfectly compatible with a sense of
liability to error. This has been so excellently put by a former writer
that we need not attempt to better his exposition. 'Every one must, of
course, think his own opinions right; for if he thought them wrong, they
would no longer be his opinions: but there is a wide difference between
regarding ourselves as infallible, and being firmly convinced of the
truth of our creed. When a man reflects on any particular doctrine, he
may be impressed with a thorough conviction of the improbability or even
impossibility of its being false: and so he may feel with regard to all
his other opinions, when he makes them objects of s