see that our opinions have
roots to them, independently of the feelings which either majorities or
other portions of the people around us may entertain about them, is that
neither political matters nor any other serious branches of opinion,
engage us in their loftiest or most deep-reaching forms. The advocate of
a given theory of government or society is so misled by a wrong
understanding of the practice of just and wise compromise in applying
it, as to forget the noblest and most inspiring shape which his theory
can be made to assume. It is the worst of political blunders to insist
on carrying an ideal set of principles into execution, where others have
rights of dissent, and those others persons whose assent is as
indispensable to success, as it is impossible to attain. But to be
afraid or ashamed of holding such an ideal set of principles in one's
mind in their highest and most abstract expression, does more than any
one other cause to stunt or petrify those elements in character to which
life should owe most of its savour.

If a man happens to be a Conservative, for instance, it is pitiful that
he should think so much more of what other people on his side or the
other think, than of the widest and highest of the ideas on which a
conservative philosophy of life and human society reposes. Such ideas
are these,--that the social union is the express creation and ordering
of the Deity: that its movements follow his mysterious and fixed
dispensation: that the church and the state are convertible terms, and
each citizen of the latter is an incorporated member of the former: that
conscience, if perversely and misguidedly self-asserting, has no rights
against the decrees of the conscience of the nation: that it is the most
detestable of crimes to perturb the pacific order of society either by
active agitation or speculative restlessness; that descent from a long
line of ancestors in great station adds an element of dignity to life,
and imposes many high obligations. We do not say that these and the
rest of the propositions which make up the true theoretic basis of a
conservative creed, are proper for the hustings, or expedient in an
election address or a speech in parliament. We do say that if these high
and not unintelligible principles, which alone can give to reactionary
professions any worth or significance, were present in the minds of men
who speak reactionary language, the country would be spared the ignominy
of seei