he is right, he is bound to hold to his opinion, despite all abuse and all penalty.
In addition to this group of ethical dissenters from the orthodox creed, there is always a group of which the individuals act against the publicly-received morality, not from conviction but from moral debility. The profligate, the drunken, the liars, the hypocrites, do not act under the belief that profligacy, drunkenness, lying, and hypocrisy, are good and ought to be practised as moral duties. They admit them to be evil, although they do them, and their conduct is the result of indifference or of moral incapacity.
How should Society treat these two groups, differing so essentially in moral strength and moral standpoint? To the first, it should yield complete liberty, showing no displeasure towards, imposing no social penalty on, those who differ from itself in their moral judgments. Recognising that in the past the dissentient minority has often been right, and that all progress in morality, as in all else, must be initiated by variations from the ordinary type, it will leave all such free to develop their theories, to live after their convictions, leaving time to show whether the variations survive, being on the line of progress, or die out as useless aberrant types.
To the second class, to those who, receiving the general morality in theory, act against it in practice, Society should show other face. Here social disapproval, social ostracism if need be, should come in to strengthen the weak will. As legal penalty for crime, so is social penalty for sin justifiable. It supplements the criminal law, and serves as protest against conduct which is indirectly harmful to Society. Legal penalty guards Society against direct, social penalty against indirect, attacks on the general good. Both are weapons necessary to self-defence, and both are liable to abuse. Only education, moderation, rationality, can ensure increasing wisdom in law and in public opinion, and manifold injustices will be committed while the mental evolution of individuals in Society differs as much as it does to-day.
Nor must it be forgotten, as Herbert Spencer has so well pointed out, that the moral code must be consonant with the moral ideal. In our Society, in which two ideals are struggling for the mastery, a coherent and generally recognised code of morals is not practicable. So long as
