Though England counts her full share of fearless truth-seekers in most
departments of inquiry, yet there is on the whole no weakening, but a
rather marked confirmation, of what has become an inveterate national
characteristic, and has long been recognised as such; a profound
distrust, namely, of all general principles; a profound dislike both of
much reference to them, and of any disposition to invest them with
practical authority; and a silent but most pertinacious measurement of
philosophic truths by political tests. 'It is not at all easy, humanly
speaking,' says one who has tried the experiment, 'to wind an Englishman
up to the level of dogma.' The difficulty has extended further than the
dogma of theology. The supposed antagonism between expediency and
principle has been pressed further and further away from the little
piece of true meaning that it ever could be rightly allowed to have,
until it has now come to signify the paramount wisdom of counting the
narrow, immediate, and personal expediency for everything, and the
whole, general, ultimate, and completed expediency for nothing.
Principle is only another name for a proposition stating the terms of
one of these larger expediencies. When principle is held in contempt, or
banished to the far dreamland of the philosopher and the student, with
an affectation of reverence that in a materialist generation is in truth
the most overweening kind of contempt, this only means that men are
thinking much of the interests of to-day, and little of the more ample
interests of the many days to come. It means that the conditions of the
time are unfriendly to the penetration and the breadth of vision which
disclose to us the whole range of consequences that follow on certain
kinds of action or opinion, and unfriendly to the intrepidity and
disinterestedness which make us willing to sacrifice our own present
ease or near convenience, in the hope of securing higher advantages for
others or for ourselves in the future.