r later your principles will triumph, which
may or may not be the case according to the nature of the principles.
But even suppose they do, are you to ignore yourself in the
interim--you, a human being with emotions, sensations, domestic
affections, and, in the majority of instances, wife and children on whom
to expend them? Why should it be calmly taken for granted by the world
that if you have some new and true thing to tell humanity (which
humanity, of course, will toss back in your face with contumely and
violence) you are bound to blurt it out, with childish unreserve,
regardless of consequences to yourself and to those who depend upon you?
Why demand of genius or exceptional ability a gratuitous sacrifice which
you would deprecate as wrong and unjust to others in the ordinary
citizen? For the genius, too, is a man, and has his feelings.

The fact is, society considers that in certain instances it has a right
to expect the thinker will martyrise himself on its account, while it
stands serenely by and heaps faggots on the pile, with every mark of
contempt and loathing. But society is mistaken. No man is bound to
martyrise himself; in a great many cases a man is bound to do the exact
opposite. He has given hostages to Fortune, and his first duty is to the
hostages. "We ask you for bread," his children may well say, "and you
give us a noble moral lesson. We ask you for clothing, and you supply us
with a beautiful poetical fancy." This is not according to bargain. Wife
and children have a first mortgage on a man's activities; society has
only a right to contingent remainders.

A great many sensible men who had truths of deep import to deliver to
the world must have recognised these facts in all times and places, and
must have held their tongues accordingly. Instead of speaking out the
truths that were in them, they must have kept their peace, or have
confined themselves severely to the ordinary platitudes of their age and
nation. Why ruin yourself by announcing what you feel and believe, when
all the reward you will get for it in the end will be social ostracism,
if not even the rack, the stake, or the pillory? The Shelleys and
Rousseaus there's no holding, of course; they _will_ run right into it;
but the Goethes--oh, no, they keep their secret. Indeed, I hold it as
probable that the vast majority of men far in advance of their times
have always held their tongues consistently, save for mere common
babble, on Lord Ch