Mr. Wells has recently told us that “from the first dawn of the human story” man has been “pursuing the boundary of his possible community.” But the prime agent of this pursuit has been the dissenter. Dissent has proved itself to be the growing point of society. Yet the dissenter has been stoned and hanged by his contemporaries. Must it ever be so? Is there no conceivable social order in which it shall be unnecessary to treat the moral pioneer as a criminal? As yet we have not achieved it. Our limit hitherto has been a kind of toleration rather grudgingly accorded so long as the dissenter does not disturb us over much. But no society will ever be truly free until it has reached the point not only of frank toleration but of the serious encouragement of dissenting opinion. For dissent is after all only a manifestation of the “_elan vitale_” of a living society; and it should be greeted with a cheer. A society incapable of dissent or of tolerating it has entered upon its last phase. III The problem of dissent, however, goes deeper than the realm of opinion. Dissenting opinion would not trouble Israel so long as it remained pure opinion. The difficulty begins when opinion is translated into action. William James said that a belief always discharges itself in an act; and this supplies us with a convenient working distinction between a belief and an opinion. But this brings us into a region where other forces begin to operate, and particularly that inner constraint to act in obedience to one’s belief which we call conscience. From the days when Plato spoke of his [Greek: daimôn] to ours, the dissenter has always claimed that he acted because he “could do no other.” He submitted to what he believed to be the instance of a moral order from which he could not appeal. His contemporaries either derided his conscience or charged him with hypocrisy; but it is worth some consideration that the contemporary judgment was reversed in almost every case.