d parallels from Ram Singh and other Indian
experiences. Pontius Pilate was in a position analogous to that of the
governor of a British province. He decides that if Pilate had acted upon
Mill's principles he would have risked 'setting the whole province in a
blaze.' He condemns the Roman persecutors as 'clumsy and brutal'; but
thinks that they might have succeeded 'in the same miserable sense in
which the Spanish Inquisition succeeded,' had they been more systematic,
and then would at least not have been self-stultified. Had the Roman
Government seen the importance of the question, the strife, if
inevitable, might have been noble. It would have been a case of
'generous opponents each working his way to the truth from opposite
sides,' not the case of a 'touching though slightly hysterical victim,
mauled from time to time by a sleepy tyrant in his intervals of
fury.'[142] Still, it will be said, there would have been persecution. I
believe that there was no man living who had a more intense aversion
than Fitzjames to all oppression of the weak, and, above all, to
religious oppression. It is oddly characteristic that his main
precedent is drawn from our interference with Indian creeds. We had
enforced peace between rival sects; allowed conversion; set up schools
teaching sciences inconsistent with Hindoo (and with Christian?)
theology; protected missionaries and put down suttee and human
sacrifices. In the main, therefore, we had shown 'intolerance' by
introducing toleration. Fitzjames had been himself accused, on the
occasion of his Native Marriages Bill, with acting upon principles of
liberty, fraternity, and equality. His point, indeed, is that a
government, even nervously anxious to avoid proselytism, had been
compelled to a upon doctrines inconsistent with the religions of its
subjects. I will not try to work out this little logical puzzle. In
fact, in any case, he would really have agreed with Mill, as he admits,
in regard to every actual question of the day. He admitted that the
liberal contention had been perfectly right under the special
circumstances. Their arguments were quite right so long as they took the
lower ground of expediency, though wrong when elevated to the position
of ultimate principles, overruling arguments from expediency.[143]
Toleration, he thinks, is in its right place as softening and moderating
an inevitable conflict. The true ground for moral tolerance is that
'most people have no right to a