Note (return) — Chapter II

'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.'[19] Most statesmen avoid this choice between the loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own conclusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word remains, and becomes part of that entity outside himself which the stateman is always building or destroying or transforming.