The law should be prepared wherever its fallibility stands proved--where, for instance, it has done hurt and damage to innocency by its operations--at least to make full reparation. It is not an honourable position, for that which holds fiduciary together with compulsory powers, to say to one whom it has falsely imprisoned or unjustly charged--“You, on the whole, benefit by government, and, therefore, must yourself bear this hurt of government which has fallen upon you.” The State or the community which permits such individual hardship to result from its imposition of a fallible code is not just in its government or dutiful to its neighbour. And if it so acts, it undermines in the governed their sense of its moral sanction. The State cannot so do hurt to its citizens and retain an unimpaired claim on their allegiance; nor can it with any moral decency claim reparation from its enemies abroad, if it does not make full reparation for its own miscarriages of justice at home. “One,” it is sometimes argued, “must suffer for the general good.” But the general good is not so served. In this connection general good only means “general cheapness.” The State, and not the citizen, must pay the price of its presumption--or it must look for an altered mind in every citizen whom it so afflicts from its position of immunity. Nay, it may be well that its supposed immunity should occasionally be disproved by a determined and self-sacrificing citizen, entirely for the general good, and the State forced to pay in extra upkeep for the bad condition of its laws. The careless self-allowance of majorities in wrong done to minorities, or even to individuals, is not to the general good; and one could rather wish to a State that its minorities should be alert and pugnacious, than its majorities self-satisfied and indifferent on the score of mere numbers. Numbers, uncorrected by conscience and uncontrolled by penalties, may be the cheapest, nastiest and most unscrupulous form of tyranny. The indifference or acquiescence of hundreds to conditions by which they themselves are not consciously affected cannot have the same moral weight as the discontent of one or of a few who are so affected. That is a consideration which must always qualify the “rights” of majorities. In such circumstances the sanction of mere numbers is not sufficient. Are minorities, then, always to have their way? By no means. We know that they cannot. Countless minorities in our political controversies have contended, have failed, and have acquiesced in their failure. Time has tested them, and has measured the depth of their grievance by the scale of human nature. But other minorities, which have persistently refused to acquiesce have won. Time has tested them also; and human nature, not numbers, has in the long run proved their case.