ose whom they count imprudent innovators. There is
nothing more amusing or more instructive than to turn to the debates in
parliament or the press upon some innovating proposal, after an interval
since the proposal was accepted by the legislature. The flaming hopes of
its friends, the wild and desperate prophecies of its antagonists, are
found to be each as ill-founded as the other. The measure which was to
do such vast good according to the one, such portentous evil according
to the other, has done only a part of the promised good, and has done
none of the threatened evil. The true lesson from this is one of
perseverance and thoroughness for the improver, and one of faith in the
self-protectiveness of a healthy society for the conservative. The
master error of the latter is to suppose that men are moved mainly by
their passions rather than their interests, that all their passions are
presumably selfish and destructive, and that their own interests can
seldom be adequately understood by the persons most directly concerned.
How many fallacies are involved in this group of propositions, the
reader may well be left to judge for himself.

We have in this chapter considered some of the limitations which are
set by the conditions of society on the duty of trying to realise our
principles in action. The general conclusion is in perfect harmony with
that of the previous chapters. A principle, if it be sound, represents
one of the larger expediencies. To abandon that for the sake of some
seeming expediency of the hour, is to sacrifice the greater good for the
less, on no more creditable ground than that the less is nearer. It is
better to wait, and to defer the realisation of our ideas until we can
realise them fully, than to defraud the future by truncating them, if
truncate them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them in
the immediate present. It is better to bear the burden of
impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle
until it becomes more hollowness and triviality. What is the sense, and
what is the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower?
Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct of
nobleness, and character of elevation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: _The Study of Sociology_, p. 396.]

[Footnote 28: No one, for instance, has given more forcible or decisive
expression than Mr. Spencer has done to the duty of not passively
accepting the curren