om have to bide
their time, and then take their chance after all. The most that the
individual can do is to seek them for himself, even if he seek alone.
And if it is the most, it is also the least. Yet in our present mood we
seem not to feel this. We misunderstand the considerations which should
rightly lead us in practice to surrender some of what we desire, in
order to secure the rest; and rightly make us acquiesce in a second-best
course of action, in order to avoid stagnation or retrogression. We
misunderstand all this, and go on to suppose that there are the same
grounds why we should in our own minds acquiesce in second-best
opinions; why we should mix a little alloy of conventional expression
with the too fine ore of conviction; why we should adopt beliefs that we
suspect in our hearts to be of more than equivocal authenticity, but
into whose antecedents we do not greatly care to inquire, because they
stand so well with the general public. This is compromise or economy or
management of the first of the three kinds of which we are talking. It
is economy applied to the formation of opinion; compromise or management
in making up one's mind.

The lawfulness or expediency of it turns mainly, as with the other two
kinds of compromise, upon the relative rights of the majority and the
minority, and upon the respect which is owing from the latter to the
former. It is a very easy thing for people endowed with the fanatical
temperament, or demoralised by the habit of looking at society
exclusively from the juridical point of view, to insist that no respect
at all, except the respect that arises from being too weak to have your
own way, is due from either to the other. This shallow and mischievous
notion rests either on a misinterpretation of the experience of
civilised societies, or else on nothing more creditable than an
arbitrary and unreflecting temper. Those who have thought most carefully
and disinterestedly about the matter, are agreed that in advanced
societies the expedient course is that no portion of the community
should insist on imposing its own will upon any other portion, except in
matters which are vitally connected with the maintenance of the social
union. The question where this vital connection begins is open to much
discussion. The line defining the sphere of legitimate interference may
be drawn variously, whether at self-regarding acts, or in some other
condition and element of conduct. Wherever this li