Your wife can decrease the noise of the radio to the point where she can still hear it, and you can move to some remote corner where you can comprehend Toynbee just as well as anywhere else. Harmony can thus be preserved by compromise. Compromise in this sense is an adjustment of physical situations. It is the process by which conflicts are reduced to the point most satisfactory to all parties concerned. Indeed, the market place, where tens of millions of transactions go only daily, is one vast area of compromise.
Buyers aim at low prices.
Sellers aim at high prices. In a free market there is an adjustment of these diverse desires. Compromise establishes the price at which the mutual satisfaction of buyer and seller is at its highest level. It is in this physical realm that most of our daily life is lived. In this realm compromise is good and it is practical.