be immoral if it
simply meant, don't fight because you will be beaten. It may often be a
duty to take a beating. But it was, perhaps, rather a way of saying
that if you want to stop the growth of democracy, you must begin by
altering the course of the social, intellectual and moral changes which
have been operating through many generations, and that unless you can
do that, it is idle to oppose one particular corollary, and so to make
a revolution inevitable, instead of a peaceful development. To say
that any change is impossible in the absolute sense, may be fatalism;
but it is simple good sense, and therefore good science, to say that to
produce any change whatever you must bring to bear a force adequate to
the change. When a man's leg is broken, you can't expect to heal it by
a bit of sticking-plaster; a pill is not supposed, now, to be a cure
for an earthquake; and to insist upon such facts is not to be
fatalistic, but simply to say that a remedy must bear some proportion
to an evil. It is a commonplace to observe upon the advantage which
would have been gained if our grandfathers would have looked at the
French Revolution scientifically. A terrible catastrophe had occurred
abroad. The true moral, as we all see now, was that England should make
such reforms as would obviate the danger of a similar catastrophe at
home. The moral which too many people drew was too often, that all
reforms should be stopped; with the result that the evils grew worse
and social strata more profoundly alienated. It is a first principle of
scientific reasoning, that a break-down of social order implies some
antecedent defect, demanding an adequate remedy. It is a primary
assumption of party argument, that the opposite party is wholly wrong,
that its action is perfectly gratuitous, and either causeless or
produced by the direct inspiration of the devil. The struggle, upon the
scientific theory, represents two elements in an evolution which can be
accomplished peacefully by such a reconstruction as will reconcile the
conflicting aims and substitute harmony for discord. On the other
doctrine, it is a conflict of hopelessly antagonistic principles, one
of which is to be forcibly crushed.

I hope that I am not too sanguine, but I cannot help believing that in
this respect we have improved, and improved by imbibing some of the
scientific doctrine. I think that in recent discussions of the most
important topics, however bitter and however much di