But, if a mode of action which, though it be generally practised and approved, injures the individual and causes him to suffer, cannot be justified on the grounds of an obvious benefit to the community, then a small, sometimes an almost infinitesimal minority of independent thinkers will rise against the custom; they are not afraid of coming into violent conflict with generally accepted views; they defend the fundamental principle of Morality, namely, consideration for the individual, against the exception, namely, oppression of the individual for the ostensible good of the community; they brand as immoral what is generally accounted moral; they announce that the current acceptation of the goodness or badness of a certain order of actions must cease. The intervention of such reformers always gives offence, and arouses anger which at times rises to murderous fury. But this wrathful indignation is just what makes a break in the automatic fashion in which the majority of average men act according to traditional custom; the attention of more and more minds is arrested, critically they examine the accepted moral law, they are penetrated first by the suspicion and finally by the clear conviction that it is contrary to the essence of Morality, and they swell the ranks of the innovators who inveigh against the tradition. The struggle lasts long and is carried on pitilessly. The preachers of the new Morality seem corrupt and criminal to the supporters of the old. They are persecuted and slandered and not seldom have to suffer martyrdom, but they always emerge victorious if their doctrine is in agreement with the logic of the fundamental principles of Moral law. That is the history of the abolition of human sacrifices, of the vendetta, of slavery, of legal torture, of religious coercion.