ate;
the only sufficient and effectual agent in so doing was consecrated
custom; but then that custom gathered over everything, arrested all
onward progress, and stayed the originality of mankind. If, therefore,
a nation is able to gain the benefit of custom without the evil--if
after ages of waiting it can have order and choice together--at once
the fatal clog is removed, and the ordinary springs of progress, as in
a modern community we conceive them, begin their elastic action.

Discussion, too, has incentives to progress peculiar to itself. It
gives a premium to intelligence. To set out the arguments required to
determine political action with such force and effect that they really
should determine it, is a high and great exertion of intellect. Of
course, all such arguments are produced under conditions; the argument
abstractedly best is not necessarily the winning argument. Political
discussion must move those who have to act; it must be framed in the
ideas, and be consonant with the precedent, of its time, just as it
must speak its language. But within these marked conditions good
discussion is better than bad; no people can bear a government of
discussion for a day, which does not, within the boundaries of its
prejudices and its ideas, prefer good reasoning to bad reasoning, sound
argument to unsound. A prize for argumentative mind is given in free
states, to which no other states have anything to compare.

Tolerance too is learned in discussion, and, as history shows, is only
so learned. In all customary societies bigotry is the ruling principle.
In rude places to this day any one who says anything new is looked on
with suspicion, and is persecuted by opinion if not injured by penalty.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It
is, as common people say, so 'upsetting;' it makes you think that,
after all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs
ill-founded; it is certain that till now there was no place allotted in
your mind to the new and startling inhabitant, and now that it has
conquered an entrance you do not at once see which of your old ideas it
will or will not turn out, with which of them it can be reconciled, and
with which it is at essential enmity. Naturally, therefore, common men
hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the
original man who brings it. Even nations with long habits of discussion
are intolerant enough. In England, where t