But the otherwise-minded is nothing if not superior to his company; and truth is after all relative as well as multiform, and needs continual nice adjustment to make it balance fairly. The great representative assembly of humanity must have its independent members below the gangway who vote with no party; and if we were all on the right side the devil's advocate would have no work to do; so that even otherwise-mindedness on the wrong side has its uses, and must not be wholly condemned. For the world would fare badly without its natural borers and hole-pickers, its finders-out of weak places, its stone walls to resist assertion and advance; and ants and worms make good mould for garden flowers. The constitutionally otherwise-minded are the worst partizans in the world and never take up a cause heartily--never with more than one hand, that they may leave the other free for a bit of intellectual prestidigitation if need be, when their audience changes its character and complexion. The only time when they are devoted adherents is if their own family is decidedly in the opposite ranks, when they come out from among them with scrip and spear, and go over to the enemy without failing a single button of the uniform. This is specially true of young people and of women; both of whom call their natural love of opposition by the name of religious principle or moral duty. Youths just fresh from the schools, bent on the regeneration of mankind and thinking that they can do in a few years what society has been painfully labouring to accomplish ever since the first savage clubbed his neighbour for stealing his hoard of roots or carrying off his own private squaw, are sure to be intensely otherwise-minded and to understand nothing of harmonious working with the old plant. Red Republicans under the family flag of purple and orange; free-thinkers in the church where the paternal High and Dry holds forth on Sundays on the principle of the divine inspiration of the English translation bound in calf and lettered _cum privilegio_; Romanists worshipping saints and relics in the very heart of the Peculiar People who put no trust in man nor works--we know them all; ardent, enthusiastic, uncompromising and horribly aggressive; with the down just shading their smooth young chins, and the great book of human life barely turned at the page of adolescence. Yet this is a form of otherwise-mindedness which, though we laugh at and are often annoyed by it, we must treat gently on the whole. We cannot be cruel to a fervour, even when insolently expressed, which we know the world will tame so soon, and which at the worst is often better than the dead level of conformity; even though its zeal is not unmixed with conceit, and a burning desire for the world's good is not free from a few slumbering embers of self-laudation and the 'last infirmity.'