anything that was in his mind, or in the minds of most of his colleagues, when he had joined it at the beginning of the year. For the rapid development of doctrine there were several causes, any of them sufficient. In an association which is itself formed by the detachment of the Extreme Left (to use the convenient French term) of a great party, the inevitable tendency is to become more and more extremist. Waverers relapse on to the main body, and the control of the movement passes more and more into the hands of enthusiasts. Such a situation gives a terrible power to logic. Friends and enemies alike are quick to detect and eager to pounce upon inconsistencies; and in human affairs, inconsistency can only be avoided by falling back from compromise after compromise to the extreme limit of abstract theory. Nor does the evil stop here. As an abstract logic becomes more and more the dominant guiding force, the refined distinctions to which logic lends itself become articles of faith over which divisions are multiplied. The more a party holding extreme doctrines defines the consequences of its principles; the more it purges itself of the ambiguities of an unformulated creed and the inconsistencies of moderate opinion: the more violent does the conflict become among the remnant left, on points that have only arisen in the course of argument. The path between right-hand heats and extremes and left-hand defections is always narrowing. In the seventeenth chapter of "The Heart of Midlothian" the master-hand of Scott has drawn an imperishable picture of the disintegration that ensues, and the loss, first of moving power on the world without, and then of vital energy within, that has overtaken so many kingdoms of the Saints. The world takes its own way, regardless of logic, impatient of theory, merciless to failure: nor is it until the years
