when a minister sacrifices the interest of his country to keep himself
in place. When it means anything better than this, it means that which
is expedient for some immediate object, some temporary purpose, but
which violates a rule whose observance is expedient in a much higher
degree. The Expedient, in this sense, instead of being the same thing
with the useful, is a branch of the hurtful. Thus, it would often be
expedient, for the purpose of getting over some momentary embarrassment,
or attaining some object immediately useful to ourselves or others, to
tell a lie. But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive
feeling on the subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the
enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which
our conduct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even
unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening
the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal
support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which
does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back
civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest
scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a
rule of such transcendent expediency, is not expedient, and that he who,
for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual,
does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict
upon them the evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they
can place in each other's word, acts the part of one of their worst
enemies. Yet that even this rule, sacred as it is, admits of possible
exceptions, is acknowledged by all moralists; the chief of which is when
the withholding of some fact (as of information from a male-factor, or
of bad news from a person dangerously ill) would preserve some one
(especially a person other than oneself) from great and unmerited evil,
and when the withholding can only be effected by denial. But in order
that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have