Thorough means the entire carrying out of a principle to its end. This can rarely be done in human affairs. When a person finds he cannot do all he would, he commonly does nothing, whereas his duty is to do what he can--to continue to assert and maintain the principle he thinks right, and persist in its application to the extent of his power. To suspend endeavour at the point where persistence would imperil the just right of others, is the true compromise in which there is no shame, as Mr. John Morley, in his wise book on "Compromise," has shown. Temperance--a word of infinite wholesomeness in every department of life, because it means use and restraint--has been retarded and rendered repellent to thousands by the "thorough" partisans who have put prohibition into it Can absolute prohibition be enforced universally where conviction is opposed, without omnipresent tyranny, which makes it hateful instead of welcome? Even truth itself, the golden element of trust and progress, has to be limited by relevance, timeliness and utility. He who would speak everything he knows or believes to be true, to all persons, at all times, in every place, would soon become the most intolerable person in every society, and make lying itself a relief. A man should stand by the truth and act upon it, wherever he can, and he should be known by his fidelity to it But that is a very different thing from obtruding it in unseemly ways, in season and out of season, which has ruined many a noble cause. The law limits its exaction of truth to evidence necessary for justice. There are cases, such as occurred during the Civil War of emancipation in America, where slave-hunters would demand of the man, who had seen a fugitive slave, pass by, "which way he had run." The humane bystander questioned, would point in the opposite direction. Had he pointed truly, it would have cost the slave his life. This was lying for humanity, and it would be lying to call it by any other name, for it _was_ lying. Thoroughness would have murdered the fugitive. The thoroughness of the Puritans brought upon the English nation the calamities of the Restoration. Richelieu, in France, was thorough in his policy of centralisation. He was a butcher on principle, and his name became a symbol of murder. He circumvented everything, and pursued every one with implacable ferocity, who was likely to withstand him. He put to death persons high and low, he destroyed municipalism in France, and changed the character of political society for the worse. The French Revolutionists did but tread in the footsteps of the political priest. They were all thorough, and as a consequence they died by each other's hands, and ruined liberty in France and in Europe. The gospel of thoroughness was preached by Carlyle and demoralised Continental Liberals. In the revolution of 1848 they spared lives all round. They even abolished the punishment of death.