wisest line of policy if it were practicable, we have nothing to do with
the circumstance that it is not practicable. And in settling with
ourselves whether propositions purporting to state matters of fact are
trim or not, we have to consider how far they are conformable to the
evidence. We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace which they
would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if they were taken as
true.

A nominal assent to this truth will be instantly given even by those who
in practice systematically disregard it. The difficulty of transforming
that nominal assent into a reality is enormous in such a community as
ours. Of all societies since the Roman Republic, and not even excepting
the Roman Republic, England has been the most emphatically and
essentially political. She has passed through military phases and
through religious phases, but they have been transitory, and the great
central stream of national life has flowed in political channels. The
political life has been stronger than any other, deeper, wider, more
persistent, more successful. The wars which built up our far-spreading
empire were not waged with designs of military conquest; they were
mostly wars for a market. The great spiritual emancipation of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries figures in our history partly as an
accident, partly as an intrigue, partly as a raid of nobles in search of
spoil. It was hardly until the reformed doctrine became associated with
analogous ideas and corresponding precepts in government, that people
felt at home with it, and became really interested in it.

One great tap-root of our national increase has been the growth of
self-government, or government by deliberative bodies, representing
opposed principles and conflicting interests. With the system of
self-government has grown the habit--not of tolerance precisely, for