acter upon the throw. The pinch is always here. Pent
in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it
weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always
rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by
which they may get free. See the abuses which the {207} institution of
private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted
among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is
to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich. See the unnamed and
unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the
marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the
unwed. See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _regime_ of
so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the
counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which
could flourish in the feudal world. See our kindliness for the humble
and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until
now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed. See
everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem
how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the
free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and
civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;
the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the
weak,--these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed
against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what
sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in
this world. These experiments are to be judged, not _a priori_, but by
actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry
or how much appeasement comes about. What closet-solutions can
possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale? Or what
can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where
every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already
provided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,
and to fight to death in its behalf? The pure philosopher can only
follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least
resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive
arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the
kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.

IV.

All this amounts to