of Truth only, but from his own involution in the matters of which he is to judge. I think that there are few lessons more necessary for men to learn, not merely who are going to take to public life, but who are going to live and move as men among their fellows, than these :—that there are few questions on which as much may not be said on one side as on the other : that there are none at all on which all the good are on one side, all the bad on the other, or all the wise on one and all the fools on the other ; that the amount of dead weight in human affairs, call it stupidity or what you will, is pretty equally divided between the advocates of order and the advocates of change, giving to the one party much of its stability and to the other much of its momentum : that intolerance is no prerogative of heterodoxy, nor tolerance the inseparable accompaniment of the conscious possession of truth, a condition which might of all others the best afford to be tolerant, the most merciful and pitiful of error : that all generalisations, however sound in logic, are in morals and practical matters ipso facto false ; that there is no room for sweeping denunciations, or trenchant criticisms in the dealings of a world whose falsehoods and veracities are separated by so very thin a barrier : to learn that simple assertion however reiterated can never make proof : that a multitude of half-believers can never make faith : that argument never convinces any man against his will : that silence is not acquiescence : that the course of this world is anything but even and uniform : that such by-words as reaction and progress are but the political slang which each side uses to express their aversions and their propensions; above all, that no material success, no energy of development, no eventual progress or consolidation, can atone for the mischief done by one act of falsehood, treachery or cruelty. Most of these lessons are truisms. Yes, but there are no truisms in facts : there are no truths