As individuals they can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant readiness to lose it.

Sometimes they must even risk the existence of their party itself.

When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four years before.

In either case Peel was doing something other and more serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of the moment.

And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.
If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what that Socialism is which influences so many lives?
He might answer himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or because when tried they failed.