Now, if your two-thirds majority is extracting comfort on unequal and compulsory terms from the remaining one-third, you surely cannot deny the right of the remaining one-third so to diminish the comfort thus compulsorily extracted as to bring it to vanishing point, or to make it even a minus quantity. And the bigger the majority which is thus extracting sustenance from the minority, and exploiting it to its own ends, the more you will admire the minority if it rises in revolt, and makes the imposed and one-sided bargain unprofitable to the majority. And should the contention be carried to extremes (as it will be if both sides are sufficiently resolved) then the majority will have to exterminate the minority, and (if it wishes to continue government on the same lines) will have to extract for exploitation a new minority from its own body—give up one of its own ribs to servitude—and so become a diminished people in its perpetuation of a bad system.
Now, these considerations of moral right are irrespective of numbers. It may be the bounden duty of one man to resist the will of hundreds, or thousands, or millions. Indeed, every religious system admits, and history gives clear evidence, that that is so. A man must obey his conscience; that is his one ultimate guide. That statement expresses what one may call the atomic theory of human society. It suggests, at first sight, an impossible splitting to pieces of all systems of law
