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ESSAYS IN ETHICS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD. 
 
 NEW ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD. 
 
 MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE. 
 
 BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS : A Sociological Study. 
 
 THE SAXON AND THE CELT : A Sociological Study. 
 
 MODERN HUMANISTS: Studies of Carlyle, Mill, 
 
 Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin, and Spencer. 
 THE FALLACY OF SAVING : A Study in Economics. 
 THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: A Study in Economics. 
 THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION: An Essay in English 
 
 Culture History. (By *' M. W. Wiseman ".) 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, ANCIENT 
 
 AND MODERN. 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. • 
 CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. 
 PAGAN CHRISTS: Studies in Comparative Hierology. 
 STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY. 
 LETTERS ON REASONING. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS. 
 PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE. 
 WRECKING THE EMPIRE. 
 CRITICISMS. a vols. 
 
ESSAYS IN ETHICS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN M. ROBERTSON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 A. AKD H. B. BONNER 
 
 I & 2 TOOK'S COURT, E.G. 
 1903 
 
LONDON 
 
 A. BONNER, PRINTER, 
 
 1 & 2 TOOK'S COURT, E.C 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface •• •• • vii 
 
 The Ethics op Propaganda i 
 
 Concerning Regeneration 27 
 
 On Compromise • 54 
 
 The Pleasures op Malignity 83 
 
 International Ethics no 
 
 Equality 142 
 
 Emotion in History 170 
 
 The Ethics of Vivisection 198 
 
 Postscript • • 222 
 
 284260 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following essays, as the headings tell, were 
 for the most part delivered as lectures. Naturally 
 some, if not all, were denounced by some who 
 heard them as ** essayish ", and I hereby own the 
 justice of the imputation. It is difficult to make 
 abstract ethics actual, and no less so to keep 
 applied ethics free of priggishness. Something 
 went wrong, perhaps, when the term '* ethics *' 
 was generally substituted for ** morals." Given 
 the drawbacks, however, certain problems have 
 to be discussed ; and the ensuing pleas seemed to 
 me to need to be put. 
 
 Perhaps the case that now least needs urging 
 is that put in the essay on ** The Ethics of Vivi- 
 section," in part a criticism of positions which I 
 believe are now abandoned by most, if not all, of 
 the opponents of cruel experiments upon animals. 
 But the analysis there undertaken is in itself, I 
 hope, not useless ; and in a Postscript I have 
 sought to indicate what I consider the sound line 
 of resistance. 
 
 Just as this preface is going to press, there is 
 published the Rationalist Press Association's wel- 
 
viii Essays in Ethics. 
 
 come cheap reprint of the late Mr. Cotter Mori- 
 son's * Service of Man \ with an extremely in- 
 teresting biographical preface by Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison, on which I am moved to say a word, in 
 view of the criticism I have passed on both Mr. 
 Morison and Mr. Harrison in the essay on * The 
 Ethics of Propaganda ' hereinafter. 
 
 On the * St. Bernard ' of Mr. Morison, Mr. 
 Harrison pronounces that its treatment of its pro- 
 blem is ** decisive, final, crucial, so far as history 
 is able to decide. It is the life of one of the most 
 
 perfect natures recorded by man It is a 
 
 noble portrait of a real saint. And the brush of 
 the painter is dipped in sympathy.*' 
 
 I will not here argue as to whether this fashion 
 of settling a disputed question by emphasis of 
 affirmation is or can be ** decisive, final, crucial "; 
 but I cannot refrain from comment on the claim 
 that Mr. Morison did his work with sympathy. 
 In the terms of the case, the sympathy was for one 
 type, one ideal, one cause. I do not hesitate to 
 say that it would to-day be impossible for any two 
 instructed men, outside of the Comtist movement, 
 sincerely to discuss the case of Abailard with less 
 of sympathy than is brought to bear on it by Mr. 
 Morison and Mr. Harrison. Neither in the 
 modern Catholic Church nor outside of it has any- 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 one, so far as I know, handled the matter with 
 such unmitigated animus. Mark Twain, indeed, 
 dealing solely with its popular side, has recounted 
 the Heloise episode and its sequel with a natural 
 indignation ; but on the question of Abailard as a 
 mind, and on his relation to the mind and the 
 movement of his age, it has been left to Mr. Mori- 
 son and to Mr. Harrison, the one writing and the 
 other discussing the Life of St. Bernard, to outgo 
 all St. Bernard's posterity in the passion of their 
 hostility to the man whom St. Bernard persecuted. 
 
 The truth is, Mr. Morison in his earlier days 
 was always a partisan ; and to call his enthusiasm 
 for his parti fris by the name of sympathy is 
 somewhat to misuse the word. To hold warmly 
 by one side in a dispute is the commonest of ten- 
 dencies : credit for a special gift of sympathy is 
 properly to be given to the man who can feel with 
 the opposing side, the side to which he does not 
 lean. And as against Mr. Harrison's claim that 
 Mr. Morison did anxious justice to Gibbon and 
 Macaulay, types with whom he was not spontane- 
 ously in sympathy, I am driven to repeat here 
 what I have said elsewhere, that he did those 
 writers, but especially Gibbon, flat injustice. In 
 that stage of his development he simply could not 
 deal fairly by types of mind which had never had 
 
X Essays in Ethics. 
 
 his own youthful bias to religious mysticism and 
 fanaticism ; and his hostile verdicts on such types 
 have for some of us, I am compelled to say, no 
 more value than those of any relig^ious fanatic. 
 I do not dispute that he made frequent and laud- 
 able efforts to praise what he felt to be the strong 
 points of the types he disliked : I am imputing to 
 him not unscrupulousness but one-sidedness, 
 zealotry, constitutional partisanism. In his latter 
 years, I gather not only from his * Service of 
 Man ', but from Mr. Harrison's significant stric- 
 tures thereupon, his early parti pris for Catholi- 
 cism was profitably modified. But the fact re- 
 mains that anyone who should discuss St. Bernard 
 with such unrelieved malice prepense as Mr. Mori- 
 son turned upon Abailard would to-day be pro- 
 nounced an utterly prejudiced partisan. 
 
 Mr. Harrison in fact gives away the whole case 
 when he tells us that Mr. Morison's * St. Bernard' 
 was ** written in sympathy, and it was prepared 
 with sympathy, under the influence of three men — 
 how very different, and yet each having much to 
 tell us about an Abbot of the Middle Ages — Car- 
 dinal Manning, Thomas Carlyle, and Auguste 
 Comte.'* It is necessary that some of us should 
 bear testimony against the pretensions of these 
 three distinguished teachers to speak judici- 
 
Preface. xi 
 
 ally on the problems of free thought, free 
 speech, and authority. None of them has made 
 the semblance of an impartial consideration of the 
 rival claims ; and from the three in concert Mr. 
 Morison could get a lead only to the champion- 
 ship of spiritual absolutism in the medieval world. 
 Their collective ** sympathy *' was given to one 
 view of medieval government. 
 
 For the rest, I am content to leave the case to 
 be tried by the assembly of readers. It is a matter 
 of deep regret to me to find myself still in opposi- 
 tion on this matter to Mr. Harrison, for whose 
 attitude and doctrine on the great test question of 
 the South African war I desire to express the most 
 unqualified admiration. There he fought as 
 hardly another man among us did or could for the 
 great cause of Justice. But it is in the same 
 cause, or, let me say, in the great twofold cause 
 of Justice and Reason, that I continue to counter 
 his treatment of a problem of the past which has a 
 perpetual bearing on the present. I will say noth- 
 ing on the practical anomaly of the part played by 
 leading Positivists in holding up to odium, as the 
 worst enemy of social order, the thinker, the ques- 
 tioner, the reasoner ; and in holding up to rever- 
 ence as the model for humanity the dogmatist and 
 the persecutor. I desire to go behind all ques- 
 
xii Essays in Ethics. 
 
 tions of ** sympathy " and appeal to the passion- 
 less tests of a science which a Comtist, at least, 
 can hardly repudiate — the science of society. 
 
 J. M. R. 
 
 May^ 1903. 
 
ESSAYS IN ETHICS, 
 
 THE ETHICS OF PROPAGANDA. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 (1897.) 
 
 Turning over a newspaper file of five years ago, I 
 read that at that time there was great trouble 
 among the educated Hindu population of Bombay, 
 on account of a series of handbills issued by the 
 missionaries of the Bible Tract Society, gravely 
 defaming the Hindu God Krishna. Public meet- 
 ings of protest were held in temples, and a mon- 
 ster indignation meeting was to be held if the 
 Government did not put an end to the provocation. 
 How the matter ended I have not been able to 
 trace ; but probably the missionaries were brought 
 to order by the authorities, under the powers con- 
 ferred by the Indian Civil Code for the prevention 
 of mutual insults among religious bodies, as being 
 likely to cause breach of the peace. What mainly 
 concerns us in the present connection is, firstly, the 
 policy pursued by the Christian missionaries, and, 
 secondly, the position taken up by the educated 
 Hindus. 
 
 As regards the missionaries, the action com- 
 plained of, though somewhat abnormal in the 
 locality, is historically typical. Nothing is more 
 certain than that the Christian organisations have 
 
2 Ms'says in Ethics. 
 
 in all ages held up to odium and ridicule the Gods 
 and creeds of other systems. The cue is given in 
 Paul's First' Epistle to the Corinthians (x, 21), 
 where he refers to the Holy Communion of a rival 
 religion as the cup and the table of " demons '*. 
 The original is not so violent in effect as " the 
 table of devils '\ which is the rendering of the 
 English version ; but still it is disparaging, a 
 demon being reckoned an inferior order of spirit, 
 whether good or bad. And Paul's teaching was 
 amply bettered by the fathers of the later cen- 
 turies. I cannot recall one early Christian dis- 
 cussion of Pagan beliefs in which those beliefs are 
 not at every opportunity treated with an unsparing 
 bitterness of contumely and derision. It is not a 
 matter of simple reasoning to show that they are 
 unworthy : the Christian Father seems incapable 
 of handling the theme otherwise than with a jeer 
 or an objurgation at the absurdities and infamies 
 he is exposing. The idea of respecting the feel- 
 ings of the heathen, of doing as he would be done 
 by, never occurs to him. And so far as we can 
 gather from those documents expressly addressed 
 to educated Pagans, the latter must have been in 
 the habit of listening to bitter attacks on their re- 
 ligion with a forbearance to which believing Chris- 
 tians have rarely attained. Nor does it appear 
 that their return criticisms were often in the key 
 struck by their opponents. The rancor, the heat, 
 the disrespect, are nearly all on the side of the 
 *' religion of love ". Of course, official Paganism^ 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 8 
 
 on political grounds, repeatedly resorted to violence 
 against Christians ; but the temper of sheer reli- 
 gious resentment of so-called blasphemy seems to 
 have been mainly confined to the ignorant Pagan 
 multitude, who called the Christians Atheists, and 
 to the educated and other Christians, who them- 
 selves habitually blasphemed the Pagan Gods. 
 
 Among the pre-Christian Greeks, again, we 
 similarly find that the passion of resentment 
 against all criticism of religion is special to the 
 ignorant multitude and to those of the educated 
 who made the highest pretentions to theosophic 
 knowledge. Xenophanes had to fly from Colo- 
 phon, and Protagoras from Athens, for moderately 
 worded doubt and disbelief concerning the Gods ; 
 and unscrupulous Conservatives like Aristophanes, 
 themselves devoid of religious belief, were capable 
 on political grounds of compassing the death of 
 Socrates by working on popular bigotry ; but 
 among the educated class the only notable type of 
 homicidal fanaticism is Plato, who has always 
 been singled out in Christian philosophy as the one 
 truly religious thinker of antiquity. Plato it was 
 who, in his Book of Laws, to the delight of Mr. 
 Froude,^ laid it down that, though given religious 
 observances may seem offensive, and stories told 
 about the Gods may seem incredible, yet upon such 
 
 atters the doubter must keep silence. " He may 
 think as he likes about the legends of Zeus and 
 
 **Life of Beaconsfield,' pp. 171-172. 
 
 V an 
 \n; 
 
4 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 Here, but he must keep his thoughts to himself : 
 a man who brings into contempt the creed of his 
 country is the deepest of criminals : he deserves 
 death and nothing less. T/ianato zemioustJio — 'Let 
 him die for it ' — a remarkable expression," 
 Mr. Froude observes, '* to have been used by the 
 wisest and gentlest of human lawgivers." On 
 which one would say that the last clause is a 
 remarkable expression to apply to a man who in 
 the first place was not a lawgiver at all, but only 
 a speculator, and who in the next place proposed 
 to meet with the last extremity of physical force 
 criticisms of religion which he expressly admitted 
 to be true, and of which he himself had in earHer 
 life produced examples. It may be argued that 
 Plato is here exhibiting his political rather than 
 his religious side. But the truth is that in his 
 case the fundamental instinct plays indifferently 
 through the two channels, and the religious con- 
 sciousness comes to be shaped by the same forces 
 as shape the political. It is characteristic of the 
 * Laws \ as Grote has noted, that there the older 
 Platonic doctrine as to conduct and politics is 
 " much more merged in dogmatic theology than in 
 the other dialogues " ;* and that his proposed 
 penal laws are '' discharges of ethical antipathy 
 and hostility against types of character conceived 
 by himself".! In the words of the same just 
 
 * • Plato and Other Companions of Sokrates,' ed. 1885, 
 iv, 276. 
 
 t Ihid. p. 411. 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda, 5 
 
 critic : * * Plato begins his career with the confessed 
 ignorance and philosophical negative of Sokrates \ 
 he closes it with the peremptory dictatorial affirma- 
 tive of Lykurgus **.| Mr. Froude, on study, 
 might have recognised the parallel to his own in- 
 tellectual career, and to that of his modern master. 
 
 Plato's development has indeed its tragic side. 
 It was after seeing the utter failure of his philo- 
 sophy to rule aright the conduct of rulers at Syra- 
 cuse — after himself failing, through sheer excess 
 of Puritanism, to turn to account his great poli- 
 tical opportunity there with the younger Dionysius; 
 after seeing his great disciple, Dion, fail similarly, 
 for lack of political tact, dying by the hand of his 
 co-disciple Kallippus — it was after all this demon- 
 stration that philosophers could not be kings, or 
 kings philosophers, that in his old age the critic 
 of other men's dogmatisms turned chief of dogma- 
 tists. The conservatism of Plato is the conser- 
 vatism of despair ; and of that despair his veto 
 on freedom of speech is the most significant ex- 
 pression. 
 
 What it broadly signifies to the retrospective 
 eye is that in the idealist's ideal the inner spirit 
 of Greek life was to become as that of the life of 
 the despotic East — the type of intellectual unpro- 
 gressiveness. It was through such channels of 
 imitation that the spirit of dogma and persecu- 
 tion gradually flooded the Western world, long 
 after Plato's time. The Christian ideal of intoler- 
 
 XIhid.\o\.i,pref. 
 
6 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 ance derives from the Jews, to whom the change 
 of belief had never come save by forcible pressure 
 from outside, and for whom the aggregate of 
 sacred books at length came to represent, in that 
 inner life of sacerdotalism which political pressure 
 could no longer affect, the absolute and unrenew- 
 able standard and storehouse of truth. And the 
 later systematic intolerance of the Christian 
 Church, which so long outwent in practical success 
 all Oriental theocracy, represents in turn the ap- 
 plication to the inner life, to the life of thought and 
 speculation, of the political methods of the Roman 
 Empire, the most triumphant development in 
 Europe of the Oriental ideal of despotism, the 
 most comprehensive check ever laid upon the forces 
 of progress. One polity for all, with no possibility 
 of strife — that was the ideal of the Empire, which 
 disarmed its subjects to make them orderly, and so 
 prepared the triumph of the barbarian invader. 
 One body of opinion for all, with no possibility of 
 innovation — that was the ideal of the Papacy, 
 which kept men for ages unable to think, and left 
 them unable to debate without resorting to mortal 
 schism and world-wide war. 
 
 This, it will be said by some, is an unsympa- 
 thetic view of the case, taking no account of the 
 services done to mankind by organisation in times 
 of intellectual beginning. Such a criticism raises 
 for us the main question at issue : Is it ever wise, 
 wise from the point of view of rational science, to 
 gag the tongue of innovation? Are we ever 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda, 7 
 
 rationally called upon to take up, in a civilised way, 
 the position of Plato, and say that doubts upon 
 any matter of habitual doctrine are to be sup- 
 pressed, in the interests of the commonweal? Such 
 a position has been taken up, if not as regards 
 our own day, at least as regards the Middle Ages, 
 by the school of Comte ; and the principle is 
 brought to a concrete issue by two able English 
 writers of that school in the discussion of a very 
 interesting mediaeval case — that of Abailard and 
 his ecclesiastical antagonist, St. Bernard of Clair- 
 vaux. 
 
 It is a little difficult nowadays to get any in- 
 tellectual sympathy for Abailard. Not only is 
 the tragic romance, which forever joins his name 
 to that of Heloise, so shaped as to put him 
 perennially in the wrong ; but the flaws of his 
 character stand up in witness against him even on 
 the intellectual plane. And faults always double 
 in their weight and deepen in their blackness 
 when their bearer is traditionally classed on the 
 wrong side. St. Peter, in the Christian legend, 
 basely denies his Lord at the supreme moment ; 
 but then St. Peter is held to carry the keys of the 
 Church and of Heaven, and his place at the head 
 of the twelve is not morally challenged. Robert 
 the Bruce treacherously slew his competitor, the 
 Comyn, in private parley in a church, violating 
 the most sacred law of honorable intercourse ; but 
 then Robert the Bruce became the hero of Scottish 
 Independence, and the typical patriot (who creates 
 
8 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 the literary tradition) makes light of the crime as 
 a picturesque feudal peccadillo. Saint Francis of 
 Assisi, again, is recorded to have been brought 
 to religion by a dangerous disease, the result of 
 his youthful debauchery ; but Saint Francis re- 
 ceives none of the condemnation passed upon the 
 lover of Heloise. It is only the man on the wrong 
 side whose sins remain as scarlet for posterity. 
 The sins of Henry VIII may become as white- 
 wash ; but not those of Abailard, who was classed 
 as a heretic by Rome, without securing the favor 
 of any other established interest. We must try to 
 regard him for the moment, however, purely as an 
 intellectual type, by way of trying in his person 
 the question of the ethics of free speech. 
 
 After telling how Abailard, with an ample pre- 
 paration in philosophical debate, took to critical 
 theology, Mr. Harrison (proceeding on the work 
 of Mr. Cotter Morison) admits that the critic was 
 philosophically in the right. 
 
 "A consummate logician had little difficulty in making 
 short work with [the orthodox theology]. It hardly needed 
 the acumen of Abailard to devise a conception of the 
 Trinity, the Incarnation and the Atonement, at once more 
 logical and more scriptural than that of the school divines. 
 There was not much philosophy in that feat. It only 
 needed a practised logician, with the unscrupulous cynicism 
 and reckless vanity of Master Peter. At last he had aroused 
 and alarmed the French bishops, then the true deposi- 
 tories of all that was vigorous and lofty in Catholicism."* 
 
 That is to say, unscrupulous cynicism and reck- 
 less vanity were part of the outfit needed to enable 
 
 * 'The Choice of Books,' 1886, p. 326. 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 9 
 
 a practised logician to frame a more logical 
 and scrupulous system of theology ; and when 
 the depositories of ail that was vigorous and lofty 
 in Catholicism were confronted by this new theo- 
 logy, at once more logical and more scriptural, 
 they became alarmed. On the next page, how- 
 ever, Mr. Harrison suddenly cancels the state- 
 ments just made by asserting that 
 
 " The system of Abailard was not more demonstrable 
 than the system he attacked. His object was only to re- 
 place a hypothetical system of belief, on which rested the 
 civilisation of mankind, by a system just as arbitrary. . . 
 . . His dogmas were as gratuitous as were those of 
 Bernard." 
 
 *' Just as arbitrary,'^ though obviously '* more 
 logical ". ** Not more demonstrable,*' and " just 
 as gratuitous ", though clearly " more scriptural'* 
 — that is, on theological principles, better demon- 
 strated. It seems impossible to carry on an argu- 
 ment from such premisses ; so, without spending 
 any time over Mr. Harrison's various estimates 
 of Abailard 's philosophical power, one turns to 
 the more practical issue of the test by results, on 
 which he thus pronounces : 
 
 " It was not till five centuries later that the Church 
 opposed the development of science. To dissolve its dog- 
 mas, whilst science was unborn, was an objectless work of 
 destruction. In Voltaire's time the Church was the enemy 
 of progress ; in Abailard' s, it was its life. In Luther's 
 time the Church was systematically corrupt ; in Abailard's, 
 it was the chief check upon corruption. Luther attempted 
 some reorganisation of society ; Descartes laid the basis 
 of scientific philosophy ; Voltaire attacked a persecuting 
 system with courageous humanity ; Abailard did none of 
 
10 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 these. He did nothing to promote science, of which he was 
 ignorant ; and he only unhinged society, which he did not 
 understand."* 
 
 And agfain : 
 
 *' His only work was to paralyse the moral sense of his 
 age, without doing anything to give a true direction to its 
 thought. The part of the Catholic system which it was 
 then quite premature to replace — its dogma — he did much 
 to darken ; that part of it which was then most desirable 
 to elevate — its discipline — he did all he could to undermine. 
 The small residuum of truth he uttered could have had, 
 and was intended to have, no practical effect ; the im- 
 mense falsehood which his teaching popularised was to 
 unchain the spirit of disorder."t 
 
 Here we have, if an incoherent, certainly a 
 forcible indictment. If this should fail to stand 
 examination, it would seem diflficult to make a case 
 out against free speech on any other instance. 
 The framer is a professed friend of progress, ap- 
 plauding alike Luther and Voltaire ; he claims 
 that Abailard*s position was morally the contrary 
 of theirs ; and only on that score does he in this 
 one case condemn an innovating propaganda. Let 
 us see, then, if the facts are as stated. 
 
 First of all, did Abailard '' unhinge society ^'? 
 Did he '' unchain the spirit of disorder*'? Mr. 
 Harrison himself tells us that when the Council of 
 the Church, after Abailard 's refusal to plead, 
 passed a formal condemnation upon Abailard at 
 the instance of Bernard, '* the question was prac- 
 tically set at rest by an authoritative decision^'' % and 
 Abailard died soon after, in the monastery of 
 
 * Ihid, p. 327.. t Ihid, p. 328. % Ibid. p. 329. 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 11 
 
 Cluny. How, then, with an '' authoritative de- 
 cision '' against him, and with the question 
 '* practically set at rest ", did AbaiTard unhinge 
 society and let loose disorder? Further on, Mr. 
 Harrison thus sums up the whole character of 
 that time : 
 
 " The fact that stares us in the face, and which no satire 
 can disguise, is that in the twelfth century men sought out 
 diligently the purest, justest, and most earnest man they 
 could find, forced him to tell them his opinion, adopted it 
 after judgment as their own, and in all difficulties and 
 perplexities waited for the sanction of their best and 
 clearest mind."t 
 
 In such a society, then, how could one con- 
 demned and discredited logician, whom the mass 
 of the people certainly could not understand — how 
 could he unhinge society, undermine church dis- 
 cipline, and set up civil disorder? Mr. Harrison 
 has told us that in Abailard's time the church was 
 ** the chief check upon corruption *'. On the next 
 page, however, he states that the part of the 
 church which it was then ** most desirable to ele- 
 vate '' was its '* discipline *\ Both of these state- 
 ments can hardly be true. The indictment, then, 
 begins to break down the moment we scrutinise 
 it : on the very face of the case, some of it is in- 
 credible. 
 
 Looking further for ourselves, we find that the 
 rationalising philosophy of Abailard was indeed 
 spread far and wide by zealous disciples, but also 
 that he was only one of many teachers who sought 
 
 t Ibid. p. 342. 
 
12 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 to renovate theology, some of them in a far more 
 
 drastic manner than his. A student who has really 
 
 mastered the period, Mr. Reginald Lane Poole, 
 
 points out that 
 
 " More intrepid views than his were promulgated with- 
 out risk by a multitude of less conspicuous masters ; 
 Platonism was, in fact, the vogue of the day. "J " The 
 scholars of Chartres, for instance, following their natural 
 tastes rather than any general principles, pursued the study 
 of natural science or of the classics quite regardless of 
 theology ; in practice they even travelled beyond the 
 borders of Christianity, and Bernard Sylvester in his cos- 
 mology would only admit theological considerations under 
 protest."* 
 
 Abailard came far short of such innovation as 
 that. He taught that the Bible must be true ; but 
 that we are not bound by the opinions of the 
 Fathers — exactly the doctrine of later Protes- 
 tantism. In several points, indeed, he outwent 
 average Protestantism, as in arguing that the 
 divine light was to be looked for not only in revela- 
 tion, but in man's reason; t but he did not seek to 
 discredit a single Biblical doctrine. 
 
 On the other hand, anything done by Abailard 
 to undermine the dogma of Catholicism was prac- 
 tically as nothing compared with the popular pro- 
 paganda associated with the names of the Wal- 
 denses and the Albigenses, which was already 
 potent throughout Europe, and which at the be- 
 ginning of the thirteenth century was suppressed 
 
 X ' Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought,* 
 1884, p. 175- 
 * Ibid. p. 169. t Ibid. pp. 153, 224. 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 18 
 
 by the Papacy by systematic massacre and devas- 
 tation in Languedoc. These heretics attacked the 
 dogmatic system all along the line. If Abailard 
 was doing evil work, they must be accounted a 
 hundred-fold more guilty than he. By implication, 
 Mr. Harrison pronounces them agents of mere dis- 
 order. But in point of fact he does not once men- 
 tion them in his series of contrasts, and, sooth to 
 say, he seems to have forgotten their existence 
 when he wrote his essay, though a survey of the 
 period and its potentialities that leaves them out of 
 account is very obviously defective. 
 
 Next, as to Abailard 's influence on church dis- 
 cipline. So far from undermining it, he fought 
 strenuously for reform, which was sorely needed. 
 In this regard, too, he was one of many. Here, 
 again, let us hear Mr. Poole : 
 
 " The men whose opinions the Church proscribed were 
 just those whose activity was consistently devoted to the 
 correction of the moral disorders from which she suffered. 
 Roscelin, Abailard, William of Conches, are unsparing in 
 their exposure of abuses in the state of the clergy which it 
 was equally the desire of every earnest member of the 
 order to eradicate. If Abailard's life be thought to be 
 vitiated by a sing^le fault, his colleagues are invariably 
 blameless. The learned clergy are the exemplars of the 
 age ; the unlettered are its reproof. It was owing to the 
 latter, to their degradation in life because in mind, that 
 the Church stood in need of repeated, periodical revivals 
 of religious discipline. The stimulus of learning was the 
 least intermittent, and therefore the most trustworthy 
 motive for moral advancement ; but instead of fostering 
 the seed of promise, the husbandmen of the Church rooted 
 it up."* 
 
 * Ibid. pp. 175-6. 
 
14 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 And that this is not the view of an extreme 
 Rationalist is sufficiently proved by the fact that 
 within the Catholic Church itself, in modern times, 
 the proceedings of the Council of Soissons, which 
 condemned Abailard for heresy in 1121, are re- 
 pudiated ; and those of the Council of Sens, where 
 he was finally condemned at the instance of Ber- 
 nard, receive only qualified approval.! It would 
 thus seem that our Positivist friends are rather 
 ** more royalist than the king '*. 
 
 But let us go further. We have been told that 
 Luther wrought no harm by his innovations : he 
 was not premature. ** It was not by puzzling 
 good and sincere teachers of the people," says 
 Mr. Harrison, *' that Luther shook a corrupt hier- 
 archy. Christendom cast off the vices of Ro- 
 manism by returning to a more honest life and 
 to the original virtues of the Gospel. "+ Again, 
 what are the facts? Luther's Reformation, so 
 far from purifying life, was on his own express 
 and repeated avowal followed by the most grievous 
 dissolution of morals throughout its German 
 sphere. It was not merely that the Anabaptists 
 fell into a license which revolted all their contem- 
 poraries : Luther bitterly testifies that all around 
 him the standards of conduct declined ; and there 
 is abundant other evidence to the same effect.* 
 
 t Ibid. p. 165, n. 26. 
 t ' The Choice of Books,' p. 329. 
 
 * Cp. the author's ' Dynamics of Religion ', 1897, pp. 6-9, 
 and refs. 
 
The Ethics oj Propaganda, 15 
 
 Nay, by Luther's partial admission, His own doc- 
 trine of justification by faith had some share in the 
 process ; many students think, a very large share. 
 By that doctrine Luther assuredly did ** puzzle 
 good and sincere teachers of the people ''. What 
 can not justly be charged against Abailard can con- 
 fidently be charged against Luther : his own 
 friendliest modern biographers make concessions 
 on that head. Then, as to the point of premature- 
 ness, we have the verdict of a score of scholars and 
 thinkers, including Erasmus and Goethe, that 
 Luther threw back the intellectual progress of 
 Europe for many generations. Certainly the re- 
 lapse of German civilisation in and after the 
 Thirty Years' War w^as a disaster without parallel 
 since the Dark Ages ; and that '* spirit of dis- 
 order " was undoubtedly " unchained " by the 
 success of Luther's schism. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to deal at length with 
 the case of Voltaire. He was assuredly a bene- 
 ficent and liberating force. But the remarkable 
 thing is that every charge made by Mr. Harrison 
 against Abailard has been made by a hundred 
 writers against Voltaire, with at least a better 
 show of justification. The unhinging of society, 
 the unchaining of disorder, the undermining of 
 discipline — these were, till the other day, the stock 
 charges against all the French philosophers of the 
 generation before the French Revolution. The 
 modern answer to it all is that the true cause of 
 the explosion was not the bringing of new light, 
 
16 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 but the obdurate clinging of the champions of the 
 old order to all its dangerous elements. The 
 remedy became desperate because the case was 
 kept so. And in the light of the rational vindica- 
 tion of the precursors of the French Revolution we 
 see clearly the justification of Abailard, who, like 
 Voltaire, was one of a band of thinkers bent on 
 clearing the intellectual air. What happened in 
 the twelfth century was that the forces of progress 
 were crushed by organised clericalism, with the 
 total result of delaying for four hundred years a 
 measure of intellectual advance for which the best 
 intelHgence of the twelfth century is seen to have 
 been fully prepared. It is mere question-begging 
 to say that the attempted reform was premature. 
 What is the proof? There is none, save the bare 
 fact that the attempt was put down. But on that 
 principle, the best thought of the best thinkers is 
 always premature ; and no less so the efforts of 
 all the most zealous reformers. Wyckliffe was 
 premature ; Chaucer was premature in his ex- 
 posure of the trade of the pardoners ; Huss was 
 premature ; nay, Luther, tried by results, was 
 ruinously premature. On that line of reasoning, 
 where should we end? No reform could ever be 
 broached until the vast majority were prepared to 
 accept it without resistance — a reduciio ad absur- 
 dum. To go no further : one would think that the 
 last school to decry a propaganda on the score of 
 its having been shown to be historically premature, 
 would be the school of Auguste Comte, a teacher 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 17 
 
 whose hopes were as far ahead of possibility as any 
 that were ever put forth by reasoning men. In 
 view of his miscarriage, as of Luther's, we come 
 to the conclusion that it is not a premature speak- 
 ing of the truth that is to be guarded against, but 
 a proclamation of error at any time. That was 
 the vice of the Reformation ; and yet even as re- 
 gards the Reformation we do not now argue 
 against free speech ; because we recognise that 
 the cure by suppression would be worse than the 
 disease. 
 
 Against the Comtist verdict on the rationalistic 
 movement of the twelfth century, then, we may 
 squarely formulate this : that St. Bernard of Clair- 
 vaux, in the words of Mr. Poole, gave " an im- 
 mense impulse to the growth of a genuinely super- 
 stitious spirit among the Latin Clergy '* ;^ that 
 the moral picture of him drawn by his adoring 
 biographer and successor is thoroughly untrust- 
 worthy, being written very much in the spirit of 
 the average ' Lives of the Saints ' ; that he was 
 the unreasoning opponent, not only of Abailard, 
 but of every innovating thinker ; that he hated all 
 new thought just because it was new ; and that 
 the ruinous Second Crusade, of which he was one 
 of the most zealous promoters, did more to un- 
 'hinge society than all the heresy of the Middle 
 Ages could ever have compassed. Finally, as re- 
 gards civil disorder, it is very clear that the 
 
 *Work cited, p. i6. 
 
18 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 atrocious crusades set up by the Papacy against 
 the Waldenses and Albigenses early in the thir- 
 teenth century — crusades not to be matched for 
 ferocity and destructiveness in all religious history 
 — were simply the application of the principles of 
 Bernard to heresy within Christendom. It was he 
 and his like who *' did not understand " society, 
 because he conceived it as something fixed and un- 
 progressive ; and he is finally, at best, the type 
 of the unintelligently pious opponent of all intellec- 
 tual advance. His influence struck at all rational 
 culture alike. Mr. Harrison tells us that it was 
 not till " five centuries ** after Abailard that the 
 Church opposed the development of science. To 
 this surprising statement it is enough to answer 
 that at the beginning of the thirteenth century a 
 council at Paris solemnly interdicted the reading 
 of Aristotle's ' Physics ',t then newly made known 
 to the Latin world, while the Dominicans pro- 
 hibited every member of their order from studying 
 medicine and natural philosophy ; that Roger 
 Bacon, after being long protected by a friendly 
 Pope, was imprisoned for fourteen years, solely 
 for his work in science; that Pope Boniface VIII 
 forbade all dissection as sacrilege ; that Arnold of 
 Villa Nova was made an outcast for his persistent 
 scientific work ; and that in the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, Cecco d' Ascoli was buried alive for asserting 
 the rotundity of the earth, which doctrine the 
 
 f/^. p. 225. 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 19 
 
 Church had been anathematising on scriptural 
 grounds since the sixth century. If, as Mr. Harri- 
 son says, '* science was not yet born ", it was the 
 fceticidal activities of the St. Bernards of the 
 Church that had managed it. 
 
 Enough, perhaps, of the mediaeval problem. It 
 rises for us afresh every day. No man can under- 
 take a propaganda that strikes at established re- 
 ligious opinions without being met by one or both 
 of two charges : that he is undermining moral 
 sanctions, and that he is hurting people's feelings. 
 The first charge, though we have just seen it 
 pushed against Abailard, is going somewhat out 
 of fashion as regards contemporaries ; but the 
 second is pushed by many who energetically repel 
 the first. It is heard even in the new ethical 
 movement, some of whose members disclaim all 
 propaganda for the establishment of scientific 
 truth as against religious creeds, and stand only 
 for the rectification of conduct. Perhaps the most 
 impressive form of the argument is the plea that 
 by shaking anyone's faith we at once inflict pain 
 and destroy a moral support. This was warmly 
 urged by Kingsley on a young officer who made 
 sceptical remarks in his hearing; and the argu- 
 ment is endorsed in one of the letters of George 
 Eliot. These are moralists of high repute. And 
 yet even these, tried by the test of consistency, are 
 found to have had no better basis for their counsel 
 than the personal equation of the moment, the self- 
 regarding mood of a particular mental and nervous 
 
20 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 state. Kingsley had no thought of condemning a 
 Christian propaganda which inflicted pain upon 
 Pagans and took away one of their sources of 
 comfort. George Eliot, even in her later emotional 
 period, would not scruple to take away what she 
 held to be unsound sources of comfort from non- 
 religious people, or to pain them by holding up 
 some of their opinions to ridicule. Similarly, Mr. 
 Lang, who sharply condemns Renan for destroy- 
 ing the inner comfort of many Christians, is 
 zealous to discredit and destroy the hopes of 
 myriads of men for the betterment of this life — 
 hopes which sustain multitudes through lives of 
 discouragement and defeat. You must not dis- 
 turb the Christian's hope of heaven ; but you are 
 free to jeer at all men's hopes for a peaceful and 
 happy earth ; and the more pain you give in the 
 process, the clearer is the evidence of your skill 
 in satire. 
 
 When the more distinguished pleaders are thus 
 seen to be merely special pleaders, it is hardly to 
 be supposed that the average person who repeats 
 the formula is on a sounder footing. One is com- 
 pelled, in short, to say plainly that this charge 
 against rationalistic propaganda, of wantonly caus- 
 ing pain, is as a rule the merest ad captandum pre- 
 tence, by people who themselves are only too 
 pleased to cause pain to antagonists if they can. 
 I have seen it advanced by religious writers in 
 documents which breathed malice in every other 
 line, and which never referred to a rationalist with- 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 21 
 
 out a calumny or an invective. I have seen it ad- 
 vanced by journalists who could not write a page 
 without inserting a sneer or an insult at some one 
 whose views they disliked. I am far from deny- 
 ing that pain can be, and is, often wantonly caused 
 likewise in propaganda. The truth is, the effort 
 to cause pain is almost normal in controversy. 
 Our political life exhibits it every day and every 
 hour. But, that being so, let us try to minimise 
 the hypocrisy of charging it solely upon that order 
 of propaganda which is itself most maligned, and 
 which is in the main the most disinterested. It is 
 the simple historical fact that every new phase of 
 rationalistic thought, in age after age of the Chris- 
 tian era down to our own, has been aspersed in the 
 most ferocious way by those who held by the 
 established religion, professedly '* of love '* ; and 
 that if words could cause pain to the point of 
 death, no confessed Freethinker could have sur- 
 vived his confession for a year. Even at this 
 moment, when positive legal persecution for un- 
 belief seems extinct, there are thousands of reli- 
 gious people who would gladly ostracise an un- 
 believer to the point of pecuniary ruin ; and who 
 do their part in that way wherever they can. It 
 is sufficiently piquant that after they and their kind 
 have done their worst from time immemorial 
 against all who crossed them, we should to-day 
 be told that it is an unpardonable cruelty to hurt 
 their feelings. 
 
 But let us not make the question one of mere 
 
22 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 recrimination. It has another and a graver 
 aspect ; because a main part of the answer to the 
 complaint against the hurting of feeHngs is this : 
 that if mankind is to grow mentally at all, some 
 feelings must be hurt ; and that he who insists 
 first and last on the comfort of his feeHngs, in 
 regard to any matter in dispute, is merely affording 
 proof of his own ethical primitiveness. Every im- 
 portant advance in our knowledge of things has 
 hurt feelings in the stating. People in this con- 
 nection forget that the denial of Satanic posses- 
 sion, the discrediting of sorcery, the proof of the 
 rotundity of the earth, and of the earth's motion 
 round the sun — all aroused the keenest resentment, 
 and so must be admitted to have given pain. 
 Where, then, are we to stop? Certainly there 
 should be a sympathetic economy in these matters. 
 No grown-up man will lightly undertake to con- 
 vert his grandmother on any serious issue. Pain 
 is not to be given at random, for the mere sake of 
 shocking. But of the incidental or contingent 
 shocks of the intellectual life we must all take our 
 chance, even as in the physical life ; and he who 
 would fetter free speech on the bare plea that in 
 certain cases it gives pain, is simply playing the 
 part of an enemy to truth, and of a hypocritical 
 enemy at that. It is only one set of opinions that 
 are proposed to be coddled, never opinions all 
 round. 
 
 Of course, people spontaneously assume that 
 the particular set of opinions which they most re- 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 23 
 
 sent having criticised are on a different footing- 
 from all others. This is a primitive hallucina- 
 tion. The truth is that it is merely the feelings 
 which are seldomest questioned that are thus resent- 
 ful of collision. There have been times when an 
 attack on the British Constitution roused quite as 
 much ire as an attack on the Bible ; when the 
 term ** Republican '* connoted as much aversion 
 as was implied in the term *' Atheist '*. These 
 were, of course, the times when political orthodoxy 
 was absolutely in the ascendant, and political 
 heresy rare — the very times, one would think, 
 when common-sense on the orthodox side could 
 best bear opposition with equanimity. The trouble 
 is that it is not common-sense that rules in these 
 matters, but the much commoner contrary. And 
 so it comes about that the struggling cause, the 
 minority opinion, where that is a matter of reason- 
 ing and not of mere acquired prejudice and self- 
 interest, is usually by far the more serene under 
 vituperation and insult. It thus comes about that 
 precisely as Christianity loses ground in point of 
 numbers, and is more and more criticised, its ad- 
 herents become gradually less resentful of the 
 criticism. This is simply to say that they grow 
 more civilised. 
 
 If this should still seem an unwarrantable say- 
 ing, let the objector just recur to the case of our 
 friends, the Hindu worshippers of Krishna, so 
 passionately excited by the attacks of the mission- 
 aries on their beloved deity — so anxious that the 
 
24 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 Government should interfere. If the Government 
 did, it would be on the express ground that the 
 Hindu populations are not sufficiently civilised to 
 permit of free religious discussion among them. 
 He who takes up the Hindu attitude is simply ask- 
 ing to be classed on the Hindu intellectual plane. 
 I venture to surmise, indeed, that ere long the 
 educated Hindus will have learnt a better way, 
 and will have resorted to a counter criticism of the 
 Hebrew Jehovah and of the ethics of the New 
 Testament. In which case, doubtless, we shall 
 find the missionaries complaining bitterly of the 
 way in which these heathens lacerate their feelings, 
 and asking the authorities to interfere. 
 
 In all seriousness, the ethics of propaganda are 
 simple enough if we honestly handle them, first, 
 by the test of doing as we would be done by, and, 
 next, by the no less important test of the memory 
 of what we ourselves have done, and what we 
 have applauded when it was done on our side. 
 The test of "good taste '\ so easily turned against 
 an opponent, so easily ignored in our own interest, 
 should always be applied under these conditions. 
 The late Mr. Arnold, who so often earns our 
 esteem by his good taste, his refined way of putting 
 things, observes in the preface to his most famous 
 book"*^ that " There is no surer proof of a narrow 
 and ill-instructed mind than to think and uphold 
 that what a man takes to be the truth on religious 
 
 * * Literature and Dogma.' 
 
The Ethics of Propaganda. 25 
 
 matters is always to be proclaimed.'* This in it- 
 self is perfectly true ; and yet if the principle had 
 been applied by Mr. Arnold to all his religious 
 heroes, how hard some of them would be hit ! 
 The Hebrew prophets whom he so eulogises seem 
 as a rule to have had just the cast of mind which 
 he here condemns ; and Christians have hitherto 
 reckoned it altogether to the credit of St. Paul 
 that he held that his truth on religious matters was 
 always to be proclaimed. 
 
 It needs, then, that we bring to the problems 
 of intellectual at least as much vigilance as we do 
 to those of our civic relations. Unhappily, most 
 of us do no such thing ; and there is no such 
 checking macEinery in the former case as has been 
 built up in the latter. If we merely cared 
 supremely about speaking the truth, and about not 
 denying the truth when it is pressed upon us, the 
 disputes over propaganda would dwindle to trivi- 
 ality ; for the faults of all innovating propaganda 
 on the side of feeling would speedily give way if 
 only the opposing faults on the side of judgment, 
 faults themselves born of feeling, were less in- 
 veterate. Of this one thing we may be sure : our 
 anger at attacks on any of our opinions, as such, 
 is as sure a proof of our imperfection as any harsh- 
 ness in the attack can be of the imperfection of 
 the critic. The flesh is weak, and will at times 
 confound the ideal ; but all the same, the ideal 
 is clear — the ideal which even in an unphilosophic 
 age was struck out for the contests of the body 
 
26 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 among those who claimed gentle breeding — the 
 ideal of strenuous struggle without fraud, hard 
 hitting without unfairness, entire freedom from 
 malice in every other relation, and entire repudia- 
 tion of all desire to work any injury beyond what 
 is involved in the fair struggle itself. Such was 
 the rule for the knight of old : the civilised man 
 had need aim at least as high, in his usefuller 
 strifes and his saner vocation. 
 
CONCERNING REGENERATION. 
 
 A NEW YEAR'S DISCOURSE. 
 (1895.) 
 
 In the history of man, certain words, standing- for 
 certain ideals and convictions of a bygone age, 
 in time come to stand out like old boundary marks 
 for a new civilisation ; and dwindle from the 
 status of reverend monuments, which are part of 
 life for a devout world, to that of strange an- 
 tiquities, held worthy of preservation in the 
 museum of learning only on account of their very 
 strangeness. And as it has so often fallen out 
 in the physical life of nations, where a newcom- 
 ing race overruns a region without driving out or 
 quickly assimilating the old inhabitants, and 
 leaves them in the worshipping use of their land- 
 marks after the land has been quite otherwise 
 divided, so it happens in the intellectual life that 
 you may find one tribe of believers cherishing the 
 outward and visible sign of an old dominion, to 
 wit, a word or a doctrinal formula, in the midst of 
 a new polity, to which the verbal landmark has no 
 living relation. At best, those who cherish it can 
 but surround it in fantasy with the mental life 
 over which it once presided, and in their own 
 case seek at times to do it honor and revive its 
 significance. They stand in the shadow of a 
 name. Such a fate, or somewhat such a fate, 
 has been that of the religious word, and the reli- 
 
 ( 27 ) 
 
28 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 glous Idea, Regeneration. For the mass, even of 
 thinking men, it has become a more or less im- 
 pressive metaphor, not at all religious in its bear- 
 ing. We speak at times of the regeneration of 
 a party, of a business, of a society, as we speak 
 of a concern having '' new blood '* put into it. 
 The phrases are equivalent, and they carry no 
 solemnity with them. Even in the language of 
 the pulpit, where old symbols are longest in use, 
 it has become a phrase like another for the 
 ordinary listener, who at most vaguely connects 
 the term *' unregenerate " with habits of pro- 
 fanity. Even among the professedly religious, it 
 is only the few who are still alive to the mystic 
 force that once breathed in the words " born 
 again *'. 
 
 But a great and mystic potency there must once 
 assuredly have been in that withered phrase. To 
 how many ears must it have carried a strangely 
 solemn message : *' Verily, verily, I say unto thee, 
 Except a man be born again, he cannot see the 
 
 Kingdom of God Marvel not that I said 
 
 unto thee. Ye must be born again.'' '' Born 
 anew '' is the reading of the Revised Version ; 
 and already some of the solemnity is gone ; and 
 yet further the Revisers avow in the margin, as 
 did the older translators, that the Greek may 
 mean, "Born from above'*. And that is, per- 
 haps, the true translation, *' Born from above," 
 or ** Born from heaven ". Here we are at once 
 in the midst of ancient Gnosticism, which is as 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 29 
 
 clearly in evidence in the Gospels as in the lore of 
 the later Gnostic sects so-called ; Gnosticism be- 
 ing in fact simply the spirit of original religious 
 speculation, playing freely and ignorantly on the 
 religious lore of the past. But athough Gnosti- 
 cism is for instructed men to-day almost synony- 
 mous with ignorant and irrational fantasy, as 
 for churchmen it is synonymous with lawless 
 heterodoxy, it is not to be forgotten that it signi- 
 fied for many minds in antiquity the deepest 
 reach of spiritual insight, being, as we have said, 
 a manifestation of the very spirit that framed 
 all the religious systems, one after the other. And 
 this fantasy of being born from heaven, it is easy 
 to see, had a peculiar spell for the votaries of many 
 cults. In the Fourth Gospel, the source of its 
 influence on the later world, the doctrine is de- 
 veloped as fantastically as any Gnostic could wish : 
 *' Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, 
 he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That 
 which is born of the flesh is flesh ; and that which 
 is born of the Spirit is spirit. . . . The wind 
 bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the 
 voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, 
 and whither it goeth ; so is every one that is born 
 of the Spirit.*' There the Greek word for wind 
 is just the word for Spirit : we are in touch with 
 a cult which carries us back to the primitive 
 fancy that new vital powers are given to men by 
 water and by wind. Yet out of all these primeval 
 fancies, undoubtedly, there was built up an ethical 
 
80 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 conception ; and the conception was ethical for 
 the Gnostics commonly so-called who held it, and 
 for the Pagan Gnostic cults which cherished it, as 
 well as for the particular Gnostics who added 
 those passages to the lore of the Christists. 
 
 It is not without profit to pause for a moment 
 to note how perfectly childlike, how barbarically 
 primitive, were those far-off beginnings of the idea 
 of regeneration. The ethical heredity of man 
 
 from a dimly enlightened animal is quite as well 
 made out as his physical heredity ; and sooth to 
 say, the tracing of it ought to give an enduring 
 comfort to the thoughtful lover of his kind. For 
 if man, with his ever-repeated desertions from 
 his own ideals, his endless treacheries to his own 
 cause, were indeed to be explained as a being 
 fallen from a perfect state by his own inexplicable 
 fault, then must his prospect be hopeless beyond 
 expression. The forfeitures of the past can only 
 be repeated : deteriora sequor is the motto of the 
 race for ever. Its basenesses are but the expres- 
 sion of hereditary vice. But if it be that our kind 
 has slowly arisen from the merest animality, and 
 that the capricious admixture of good is the ever 
 increasing play of something new, and not the 
 forlorn flickering of something lost and irrecover- 
 able, then there is a light of hope in the darkest 
 place. Man's basenesses and benightedness are 
 but the dwindling vestiges of the aeons of the 
 brute, and of the brute sophisticating into hu- 
 manity. Our best current morality, if we come 
 
Concerning Regeneration, 31 
 
 to think of it, is not such that we need blush to 
 trace it from anthropophagous ancestors, ar- 
 boreal in religion if not in habits. 
 
 And so, when we turn to Mr. Frazer's learned 
 and fascinating treatise on * The Golden Bough *, 
 we learn without extreme astonishment that in the 
 rituals of the most unqualified savages this idea 
 of being born again is seen at play, and not with- 
 out an ethical implication, as the ethic of savages 
 goes. There the ideal of '* dying in order to 
 live '*, supposed to be a supernatural gift to one 
 part of mankind, is part of the stock-in-trade of 
 tribal sorcery. Among the aborigines of Austra- 
 lia, among negroes, among redskins, among the 
 peoples of South American islands, we find the 
 strange religious custom of treating boys at 
 puberty as incurring new and supernatural risks, 
 against which they are to be safeguarded by a 
 process of initiation in which it is pretended that 
 they are put to death and brought to life again. 
 It is a regular annual ceremony, carried through 
 with much earnestness and endless detail. Far 
 from these barbaric mummeries, but without 
 doubt on the same line of evolution, is the Brah- 
 manic usage of pronouncing the Brahman "twice- 
 born " on his investiture with the sacred thread. 
 And of the same heredity, without doubt, was the 
 initiation of the votaries in the great cult of 
 Mithra, so long the formidable rival of Christism, 
 in which a pretence of slaying the neophyte was 
 part of the ceremony. In every case, the idea of 
 
82 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 being " born again " is more or less clearly pre- 
 sent ; and there is no reason to doubt that in the 
 old cults alongside of Christianity the idea had as 
 much ethical content as it had in Christianity it- 
 self. To the primeval sorcery of the savage had 
 succeeded the groping mysticism of the theolo- 
 gians and the moralists : the new birth was no 
 longer a mere charm against evil spirits, it was 
 in part a step towards a conquest of the evil prin- 
 ciple in oneself. For many ages had men moved 
 in this direction on the road of sacrifice and 
 austerity, prayer and self-mortification. The idea 
 that men become sainted by renunciation is no in- 
 vention of Christianity : it is common to most 
 savages and to all religious systems of the world. 
 The current ideas of morality are to a large ex- 
 tent developments of ideas which may be termed 
 pre-moral ; ideas of sorcery and magic and de- 
 monic agency. And in the ancient ritual of the 
 sacramental eating of the slain divine victim we 
 have one of the points at which primeval mystic 
 emotion joins hands with the instinct of moral 
 betterment, the worshipper being held to be pre- 
 pared by the mystic act for a new and better 
 living of the present life, as well as assured of 
 salvation for the next. 
 
 Let us not lose sight of the ethical aim because 
 of the grossness and strangeness of the rituals 
 on which it was grafted. Only by animal move- 
 ments have men been able to rise above the 
 animal to the life of reason. The great fatality 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 33 
 
 has been that the barbaric institution, being 
 cherished in virtue of the spirit of reverence and 
 faith, has served as much to bar the way to a 
 higher plane as to foster the spirit which seeks 
 that way. This ancient idea of regeneration, 
 seized anew by the modern intelligence in the light 
 of modern knowledge, may serve to express the 
 highest reach of the moral instinct. But to do so 
 it must be held with a new consciousness, far re- 
 moved from the temper of ritual and mysticism. 
 It must not be held as a ritual spell or as a 
 sectarian password ; it must not be grafted on a 
 dead tradition, an incredible faith. It must be a 
 reasoned perception, deriving not as of old from 
 ignorance but from knowledge. Instead of an 
 act of faith it must be an act of doubt. 
 
 If we consider impartially the practical force, 
 the bearing on conduct, of the idea of mystic re- 
 generation in the ancient world, we shall see that 
 there is small reason to attribute to it any wide 
 transforming power. What regeneration meant 
 for most of those who sought it was, first, the 
 being saved for happiness in the next world, while 
 the unregenerate were doomed to torture ; and, 
 secondly, the being " dead to sin ** in the sense of 
 renouncing or controlling one or two carnal appe- 
 tites. There can be no doubt that for the ancient 
 pietists, sin figured mainly as an animal act, 
 though lying and thieving and blasphemy were of 
 course specified and denounced. That is to say, 
 the believer had no perception whatever of his 
 
84 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 most vital defect ; since thieving and blasphemy 
 were not acts he would be normally prone to, and 
 his notion of lying was crude to the last degree. 
 It is no doubt true that in the Gospels, as in a 
 fuller degree in the writings of the Stoics, we have 
 gleams of a recognition of a higher and a wider 
 need and possibility of reformation. In particu- 
 lar, we have one or two phrases which are quite 
 startling in the completeness of their assertion of 
 the scope of the moral law : ** I say unto you, that 
 every idle word that men shall speak, they shall 
 give account thereof in the day of judgment ; for 
 by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy 
 words thou shalt be condemned.*'* And again: 
 ** I say unto you that every one who is angry 
 with his brother shall be in danger of the judg- 
 ment ; and whosoever shall say to his brother, 
 Raca, shall be in danger of the council ; and who- 
 soever shall say. Thou fool, shall be in danger of 
 the hell of fire.^'t 
 
 These, be it remembered, are Judaic and pre- 
 Christian doctrines, like nearly every other sen- 
 tence in the Sermon on the Mount, being found in 
 closely similar wording in the Talmud, whose 
 compilers would certainly not borrow them from 
 the Christians. This consideration may help some 
 to take a rationally critical view of them. And 
 when we do this, it becomes clear that though 
 the utterers had come within sight of an intellec- 
 
 *Matt. xii, 36-37. fMatt. v, 22. 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 86 
 
 tual morality, a morality of the mental life, they 
 had no properly intellectual hold of it. Consider 
 the futility of telling men that they will incur the 
 ferocious wrath of Deity if they give way to 
 wrath. Anger is to be checked by a menace of 
 the worst extremity of anger. Recklessness of 
 speech is to be checked not by rational reflection 
 but by the threat of police prosecution or eternal 
 torture. The threatener is in fact allowing him- 
 self the wildest possible licence of the very vice 
 he condemns. And even if the temper of wise 
 self-restraint were not thus flouted in the very 
 wording of the inculcation, it is sadly clear that 
 the general drift of the Christian scriptures, to 
 say nothing of the Jewish, is not at all in favor 
 of self-criticism of the fundamental kind, the 
 checking of the instinctive impulse at every out- 
 let by the second instinct of self-restraint. In 
 the very mouth which is made to utter these men- 
 aces against vituperation and contempt, the same 
 documents put tirades of the severest vituperation 
 and contempt. The uncritical worshipper en- 
 dorses these tirades blindly, on the score that they 
 were justified. But such justification makes an 
 end once for all of the precept of abstention from 
 hard names, for the tirades are directed indis- 
 criminately, against whole classes of society ; and 
 for that matter the inconsiderate railer always 
 supposes he is justified, else he would hardly rail. 
 Comparing the precepts and the practice of the 
 sacred books, we can but conclude that in that era 
 
 D2 
 
86 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 of ignorance and social dissolution, some men had 
 g-Iimpses of a strict morality, not only for the 
 bodily life but for the mental life, yet failed even 
 for themselves to relate their conduct to their 
 momentarily seen ideal, and of course failed 
 utterly to impose it on others. We have only to 
 consider the material of which early Christendom 
 was made to see how impossible it was that the 
 idea of regeneration should be for the people any- 
 thing but a crude notion of bodily abstention here 
 and bodily bliss hereafter. We find Paul re- 
 proaching his converts at Corinth for that in their 
 eating of the Lord's supper ** each one taketh be- 
 fore other his own supper ; and one is hungry and 
 another is drunken *' ;^ that they go to law with 
 each other before Pagan judges ; that some of 
 them scandalise Gentiles by their family life. It 
 must needs have been so. A truly moral race 
 cannot rise fortuitously or by mere preaching on 
 a basis of ignorance and social decay. If re- 
 generation is to have a vital meaning for us, it 
 must be through our thinking it out for ourselves, 
 in terms of our own problems, our own vices, our 
 own ideals, our own science. 
 
 What then should it mean? Is the symbol at 
 all translatable into modern and rational action? 
 I think it is. Even for the ancient pietist, it 
 meant in part an act of conscious self-adjustment 
 to life, as he saw it ; a saying to himself, Hence- 
 
 * I Cor. xi, 21. 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 37 
 
 forth I am a new man, acting on different motives, 
 following" not my own will and instinct but the 
 higher law laid down for me. Given a modern 
 conception of the moral law and the purpose of 
 life, may not the modern set up for himself the 
 higher and broader ideal of renewal which befits 
 that? First, what is the great difference between 
 the ignorant and the scientific, the pietist and the 
 rational, conception of the purpose of life? Surely 
 it is the substitution of a terrestrial for a celestial 
 ideal : the purpose of re-organising the actual life 
 instead of the purpose of securing safety in a 
 future life after the speedy destruction of a world 
 that is past redemption. Given that substitution, 
 the individual ideal of reformation, of regenera- 
 tion, must be made to correspond. First of all, 
 it cannot be a mere ideal of the domestic virtues, 
 of the management of physical appetites, and the 
 avoidance of the crimes forbidden by the ten com- 
 mandments. The normal citizen to-day is not a 
 drunkard or a debauchee ; if he is covetous it is 
 a good deal by force of circumstances ; and if he 
 lies in the way of business it is because he does 
 not see his way clear to succeeding in business 
 otherwise. To regenerate him in these matters 
 there would be needed an alteration of the social 
 system. To this we always come back. The new 
 purpose of life being a purpose of social recon- 
 struction, not an escape from a doomed world, 
 the ideal of the new life is above all things an in- 
 tellectual ideal, and the new idea of regenera- 
 
88 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 tion must be above all things a regeneration of 
 the intellectual man, of the man not as a unit in 
 relation to other minds but as a unit in relation to 
 an organic aggregate ; of the man as a conscious 
 part of a whole, and that whole not a sect or a 
 tribe, but humanity itself. 
 
 The old conception of virtue and holiness as 
 a mere repression of the appetites, a life of hunger 
 and celibacy, with endless ritual thrown in, is 
 here left a thousand miles behind. No nation was 
 ever destroyed, or ever degenerated, through 
 mere wilful indulgence of appetite. No nation, 
 indeed, ever died of its vices : the physical force 
 of another nation is always needed to compass 
 even the nominal death of a nation as such. It 
 is not the physical vices and the cruder crimes 
 that we need most to guard against, but the intel- 
 lectual vices which allow whole nations to sink in 
 physical vice for want of intellectual salt. Even 
 if the danger before modern societies, as before 
 the ancient, were the danger of overthrow by out- 
 side violence, which it is not, the safeguard would 
 still be in the intellectual life. We realise that 
 a country which undergoes a crushing defeat even 
 in a war of its own provoking may confidently 
 be pronounced socially corrupt to begin with ; and 
 the cure of social corruption is not a matter of 
 governing the animal appetites and getting by 
 heart the ten commandments, but of developing 
 intelligence in all directions. Thus did Prussia 
 after Jena ; thus did France after Sedan. If we 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 39 
 
 in this country really run the risk of military at- 
 tack of which we are always hearing, our inner 
 danger will not lie in not having more ships of 
 war than any four naval Powers, but in the lack 
 of disinterested skill and science throughout the 
 nation, in the defect of a hardy and happy popu- 
 lace, in the multiplication of ill-fed and sickly 
 drudges, in the chaos of blind commercial self- 
 seeking. Rome fell not for lack of mere armies, 
 but for the lack of a social system that could breed 
 vigorous and self-respecting men, and the brains 
 to lead them. Even on the militarist view of life, 
 a view which is becoming freshly prominent 
 among us at present, the needed regeneration is 
 a regeneration through the life of the mind, a 
 treatment of society in terms of science, a study 
 of human life as a social problem, and not as a 
 problem of individual creed and individual salva- 
 tion. 
 
 But it is surely not now necessary, for thought- 
 ful men, to call up the spectre of foreign invasion 
 in order to gain heed for the social problem. To 
 the most moderately considerate man, the deep 
 social disease, the vast domestic misery, is matter 
 enough for pondering, whether or not there be an 
 armed enemy to come. And if on all hands we 
 are thus driven to seek for an intellectual re- 
 generation, we may without more ado ask what 
 should be its method, what should be its fruits. 
 It is not a matter of proposing programmes, poli- 
 tical or other, but of calling up that frame of 
 
40 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 mind in which programmes can best be studied 
 and appreciated. We are at the New Year, the 
 time of good resolutions. What resolutions 
 should a good citizen make who thinks of more 
 than his own individual betterment in the year to 
 come? 
 
 Perhaps we shall answer the better if we go 
 back a moment on our distinction between the 
 intellectual and the animal life. Of course the 
 distinction is broad and inexact. There is no 
 clear dividing line. As our physiological psycho- 
 logists teach us, the whole man thinks. The in- 
 tellectual man, the sociologist, has his personal 
 prejudices and predilections ; he is not the purely 
 imj5artial truth-seeker of his own ideal ; and noth- 
 ing can hinder that Tolstoy shall see life in the 
 light of his liver-complaint and his ageing 
 physique as well as of his creed and his logic. 
 The intellectual life, then, has its vices of bias 
 and egoism and temperament, like the bodily or 
 the commercial life. We gratify our partisanships, 
 our prejudices, as we gratify our appetites, or our 
 covetousness. But that simplifies our problem. 
 If the regenerate man of the ancient world was to 
 look to his simpler impulses and over-rule them, 
 we must in turn look to the analogous impulses of 
 the life of ideas and opinions. We must not only 
 seek consciously the best and highest : we must 
 examine ourselves as to the rectitude of our 
 search, the strictness of our criterion. And if 
 any man thinks this an easy or a small matter, 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 41 
 
 we may say with Emerson, Let him try to live by 
 that standard for one day. 
 
 To begin with, how many of us, meeting with 
 a new doctrine in to-morrow *s newspaper — not in 
 the leading columns of course : there are never 
 any new doctrines there — or meeting even a 
 reiteration by a new speaker, or in a new speech, 
 of a doctrine we have already rejected — how many 
 of us will consider that new or old doctrine for a 
 minute with an open mind, asking ourselves 
 whether there is really anything in it, whether we 
 may after all be wrong, whether we are doing 
 justice to our opponents, whether it would not be 
 wise to propose a compromise? It is perhaps not 
 inconsiderate to say that the majority of our fel- 
 low-citizens will do no such thing. If we are to 
 judge by the history of certain modern reputa- 
 tions, and of certain modern doctrines, the 
 majority even of the men who concern themselves 
 with new books and new ideas have nothing but 
 animal animosity for any writer who strikingly 
 calls in question their beliefs or their prejudices. 
 No doubt the animosity is less brutal than it used 
 to be. No poet of capacity could now be vilified 
 and insulted as were Shelley and Keats by the 
 Tories of their time ; no scientific theory, even if 
 unamiably set forth, could meet with such fero- 
 cious obloquy as was cast by religious people on 
 the earlier works of Darwin, the most amiable of 
 innovators. Stupidity itself has progressed : it 
 is wittier than of old. But it remains the spon- 
 
42 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 taneous habit of most men to meet with scorn or 
 sneer every doctrine, nay, every form of literature 
 or art, which does not chime with their estab- 
 lished tastes, never dreaming that it can be their 
 duty to hear it and study and weigh it with 
 scrupulous concern for justice. 
 
 This certainly holds true of the bulk of those 
 whose profession it is to review new opinion, new 
 art, new theory. No doubt the common run of 
 journalistic criticism is below the common stan- 
 dards of criticism of instructed people, because 
 journalism, with its immoral and humiHating 
 commercial conditions, tends more and more to 
 repel scrupulous men, and the men whom it does 
 not repel are not likely to feel special concern for 
 fairness towards opponents. But journalism, 
 after all, only follows the ordinary drifts of 
 opinion ; the Press is an echo of the platform ; 
 and the platform rests on the average of the 
 classes and masses. If most people were not 
 recklessly unjust to opinions or arguments which 
 clash with theirs, the newspapers could not falsify 
 and asperse and misrepresent as wantonly as they 
 do. The vice is normal. Now, as that very vice 
 is its own means of perpetuation ; and as the 
 spirit of malice among men is the sure barrier to 
 their general well-being, it is very evident that the 
 cure must arise in a new consciousness, resting on 
 knowledge. The mere growth of amenity of tone, 
 though that is a great thing, is certainly not 
 enough. Some admirable cultivators of amenity 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 4B 
 
 have shown very little concern for fairness ; and 
 well-mannered disingenuousness is only less dis- 
 astrous to a good social understanding than ill- 
 mannered disingenuousness. There must be pains- 
 taking over the matter of a criticism as well as over 
 the manner. There must be at least the glimmer- 
 ing of a sense of shame over a flat inconsistency. 
 There must be an awakening to the idea that to 
 misrepresent a man is about as unworthy as to 
 cheat him at cards ; and that to stand obstinately 
 to a chance misrepresentation when it has been 
 brought to your notice is as ignoble as it would 
 be to deny an error in play or business when you 
 have profited by it. In short, we want an intel- 
 lectual ethic, an intellectual new birth. 
 
 We have no lack in this country of loud and 
 austere criticism of a few forms of wTong-doing 
 which a century ago went unreproved. Even in 
 these matters there is sufficient of gross inconsis- 
 tency ; and the most real political wickedness is 
 openly condoned by moralists who wax prophetic 
 over personal offences often much more conven- 
 tional than real. Puritanism, w^hich once meant 
 a great deal more than prudery, has latterly come 
 to stand for little else ; and we find people seri- 
 ously justifying the abandonment of a great poli- 
 tical scheme on the score that the leader of a 
 party which chiefly promoted it has been in the 
 divorce court. It is not that they think the 
 scheme bad : on the contrary, they had been sup- 
 porting it as a measure of beneficent reform : what 
 
44 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 they are thinking of is the sin of co-operating with 
 ** a bad man '*. The welfare of a whole race is 
 thus confessedly treated as of no account what- 
 ever in comparison with the duty of repudiating 
 an ** immoral '* politician : as if this casting-off of 
 the cause of despairing millions were not an im- 
 morality of the worst sort. In this particular 
 matter, as it happens, Protestantism and Catho- 
 licism have joined hands ; but the act, broadly 
 speaking, savors much more of Protestant than 
 of Catholic practice ; and it is well to keep before 
 our thought the specific dangers of evil action that 
 accrue to our particular conventional code. To 
 let habit do the work of judgment, and to take 
 for licit all that is not customarily banned in the 
 pulpit, is merely to let the moral sense atrophy. 
 And there are always some who find their account 
 in so doing. Politics seems to be a perpetual 
 school of demoralisation, witness some perfectly 
 matter-of-fact revelations which have lately been 
 made of the ethics of American political manage- 
 ment. We learn, from an apparently well-in- 
 formed, temperate, and careful writer, that a 
 local party-leader, with a high repute for the 
 popular Christian virtues, a blameless family man, 
 a total abstainer, and a regular communicant, has 
 been known to ruin another, all in the way of 
 party policy, by a planned series of private false- 
 hoods and treacheries worthy of the ideal scoun- 
 drels of the Italian Renaissance. We shall do 
 well to keep before us these samples of what Pro- 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 45 
 
 testant morality can attain to, of what the Puri- 
 tan ethic can putrefy down to, when deprived of 
 the daily light and air of fresh reason and new 
 science. It can grow abominable for sheer lack 
 of vivifying mind. 
 
 But if the mere Puritan instinct for certain 
 forms of conduct can go thus frightfully astray, 
 what is the likelihood that tradition and emotion 
 will save us from utter licence in the intellectual 
 life, considered as far as possible in itself? We 
 have only to look around reflectively to see men 
 who hold it their mission to correct immorality of 
 one kind, themselves falling every day into a hun- 
 dred sins of false judgment, false inference, false 
 guidance, false criticism, false representation of 
 fact. If the bad example of one man, in what 
 we may call the personal life, can encourage or 
 lead astray the tens, the bad guidance of such 
 leaders of opinion in the intellectual life can con- 
 firm in unreason the thousands whose conception 
 of social science will determine the next stage of 
 society. It can be no justifying answer, on be- 
 half of such a loose and incompetent thinker and 
 teacher, to say that he is acting up to his lights. 
 Half the vice he condemns is just as spontaneous 
 and as unrepentant. If we are to sit in the chair 
 of judgment, let us, in the name of righteous- 
 ness, judge every line of action, every indulgence 
 of impulse, every human self-gratification, with an 
 eye to its consequences. Let us not call a bodily 
 appetite a lust, and there an end, while we allow 
 
46 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 an ungoverned bias and egoism of speech and 
 doctrine to pass as blameless because self-satis- 
 fied. Surely, of all ways in which we can be 
 *' materialist '*, this course of applying moral 
 tests only to bodily actions or to intellectual 
 actions which directly affect bodily interests, is 
 *' materialistic ** in the most discreditable sense. 
 But such a standard, I confess, seems so re- 
 mote from average feeling and practice, that some 
 are likely not only to put it aside, but to find it 
 unintelligible. Broadly speaking, we have arrived 
 in our ethics at governing or proposing to govern 
 the animal life by intellectual considerations, while 
 we think fit to carry on the more strictly intellec- 
 tual life, or a great part of it, in the non-moral 
 fashion of the animal. In our very ethics, three 
 times out of four, most of us express an inherited 
 sentiment or prejudice rather than a dispassion- 
 ately reasoned conclusion. And as there is so 
 little anxiety about being vigilantly right, there is 
 little remorse about being* wrong, even when error 
 is recognised : at least there is small thought of 
 retractation. The old churches, with their old 
 ethic, prescribed confession and penance for the 
 sins of the flesh and the conventional sins of the 
 spiritual life ; and some have proposed the revival 
 of these institutions on a public and non-ecclesias- 
 tical basis. But who proposes a confessional or 
 a penance for reckless indulgence of prejudice, for 
 uncritical belief, for scornful rejection of a creed 
 or of a criticism without any candid examination 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 47. 
 
 of its value? Who ever says or sighs, I fell there 
 into a gross fallacy ; I fought for a sophism ; I 
 vilified an honest reformer ; I did my best to dis- 
 hearten a disinterested artist, and all out of in- 
 considerate prejudice and mental sloth : v^ho 
 makes these confessions even to himself, much 
 less to the world? Instead of any leaning in that 
 direction, we have ostentatious attempts to justify 
 the unreasoning in their irrationality — treatise 
 after treatise arguing that the sufficient justifica- 
 tion of a creed is that it feeds the cravings of 
 those who hold it ; that it is not to be tried by 
 the tests of evidence or of consistency ; that the 
 believer is a law unto himself in respect of his own 
 interpretation of his own inclinations. 
 
 If a drunkard were thus to justify his alco- 
 holism, kis craving for nervous stimulation ; if a 
 new sect, reviving the Antinomianism of the early 
 and Middle Ages, were to announce that they 
 held themselves free in Christ to follow all their 
 desires ; if a philosopher pressed the idea of self- 
 development to the point of saying that what 
 others call vice is for him a pleasing experience 
 like another, and that he will listen to no criti- 
 cism, all other men would call it the very effron- 
 tery of lawless egoism. Yet this is the very spirit 
 which, in the intellectual life, refuses to try certain 
 pleasing beliefs by the standards by which men 
 try all other beliefs. If any man were to assert 
 that a doctrine in geology or botany is justified 
 by the fact that it satisfies some people's senti- 
 
48 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 ments, and that mere reason and proof are not to 
 be listened to as against the inward satisfaction 
 of beheving-, the spiritual sense of rightness, 
 he would be regarded as beneath derision. Yet 
 he would only be saying something strictly 
 equivalent, in ethics and in logic, to what is being 
 said afresh by a dozen serious writers on religion 
 year after year. Of course we know^ that these 
 writers are " sincere ** and self-satisfied. Let the 
 point be duly insisted on ; and let us remember 
 that the Antinomians of the past, from the con- 
 verts of Paul onwards, were sincere and convinced 
 and self-satisfied. It is not a matter of allotting 
 blame, but of tracing consequences. And if 
 Christian Antinomianism, or rejection of law 
 in matters of personal action, tended in the past 
 to the dissolution of society, we may be very well 
 sure that the new Christian Antinomianism, which 
 rejects the laws of reason and proof in matters 
 of belief, can tend only to prevent society from 
 evolving to a happier state. Half of the solid 
 suffering of mankind comes of want of effective 
 intelligence, want of intelligent accord, want of 
 exact calculation. We may depend upon it that 
 we shall never remove much of that solid suffering 
 until we make as great a difference between our 
 intellectual habits and those of our ancestors as 
 we do between our methods and theirs in physical 
 science. The abstruse alchemy of human rela- 
 tions will never be mastered by bringing to their 
 study less of precision and impersonal concern 
 
Concerning Regeneration, 49 
 
 ^irt 
 
 for truth than the alchemists of the Middle Ages 
 brought to the very beginnings of chemic science. 
 If we reck our own rede in this matter, how- 
 ever, we shall have to anticipate reasonable ob- 
 jection ; and two objections do suggest them- 
 selves. First, is it not prescribing an impossible 
 perfection to men who in the terms of the case 
 are not aware of their misdoing, and cannot hold 
 the ideal : is it not, in Voltaire*s phrase, a revival 
 of '* the insane project of being perfectly wise "? 
 And, again, is there not a danger that an intel- 
 lectual habit of constant reconsideration will leave 
 a man sceptical of all things, without convictions, 
 impotent? Clearly, we may go astray in these 
 ways. But I do not think the danger is freshly 
 created by the prescription in hand. It is not, 
 to begin with, a prescription of a quite new prin- 
 ciple of action. Everybody admits that every- 
 body ought to be fair and candid, ought not to 
 be bigoted, ought to have an open mind for truth : 
 even the Catholic who is taught to give no ear 
 to sceptical argument is also taught to condemn 
 the unbeliever who will not listen to Catholic 
 truth. Even those who rush to a new treatise 
 which promises to show them that irrationality 
 is rational, and reason unreasonable — even these 
 are in a confused way doing homage to the supre- 
 macy of reason. They want to satisfy themselves 
 that they are somehow right. And everybody 
 nowadays admits that it is wrong to falsify, to 
 misrepresent. And although we find that a con- 
 
 B 
 
50 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 stant profession of concern for truth went along 
 with a constant resort to forgery and interpola- 
 tion among the pious compilers of the Jewish and 
 Christian sacred books, so that we can never, 
 without anxious scrutiny, trust a single ancient 
 document as being what it purports to be — still 
 the modern sense of truth and justice has been 
 developed sufficiently to make the ideal of Intellec- 
 tual purity a possible one for many. It needs, 
 perhaps, that they should first learn how enormous 
 is the harm that can be done by false reasoning. 
 Even as false religious ideas, insane conceptions 
 of revelation and divine devolution, have led to 
 immeasurable bloodshed, so false economic ideas 
 in the past have slain millions of men and de- 
 stroyed untold wealth, while later fallacies of 
 economic reasoning, albeit not directly implicated 
 in bloodguiltiness, have sanctioned and will sanc- 
 tion blunders of social action which mean the 
 misery of millions more. The platitude that 
 ** Evil is wrought by want of thought as well as 
 want of heart *', kindles into a lurid record when 
 you realise how much it can mean. 
 
 Doubtless the discipline that would avoid such 
 evil is hard. It is only the mystic hallucination 
 of righteousness that comes easy. The late Mr. 
 Froude has recently been quoted as saying in 
 talk that " It's easy enough to tell half-truths or 
 white lies, or to say the weather Is good, bad, 
 or indifferent ; but to tell the pure, unalloyed 
 truth is a task arduous enough for the profoundest 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 51 
 
 intellect — and yet it needs no education. It de- 
 mands only heart and spirit." Depend upon it, 
 that last dictum, which characteristically contra- 
 dicts the first, is an error. If anything in the 
 world needs an education, the telling of the truth 
 does. Merely to relate simple events accurately 
 is a thing much harder than lying. It is only vice 
 that ever dispenses with education : virtue cannot. 
 But undoubtedly there is needed the heart and 
 spirit as well as the discipline. In fine, you can- 
 not make the silken satchel of righteousness out 
 of the sow's ear of animal egoism and animal 
 ignorance by any machinery yet framed. 
 
 Still, it is no chimerical thing to look for in* 
 creasing scrupulosity of thought and speech from 
 mankind at large. We have not prescribed a 
 visionary altruism, such as that of the passage 
 in the Sermon on the Mount which tells the buf- 
 feted man to turn the other cheek. That pre- 
 scription, by transcending so far normal human 
 nature, has done worse than fail : it has left men 
 heedless of a more rational limitation on vindic- 
 tiveness. And I have not suggested an intellec- 
 tual non-resistance, out-Tolstoy-ing Tolstoy. If 
 even Tolstoy is consciously free to resist criticism 
 sharply by words, we may perhaps count ourselves 
 within the bounds of intelligent morals inasmuch 
 as we use, always after careful reflection, the 
 weapon of speech against those who seek to slay 
 
 tith it. It is meet that those who begin with the 
 vord rather than the trumpet should be met with 
 
52 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 the sword, whether or not they are to fall by it ; 
 that he who seeks to chastise with whips for mere 
 difference of opinion should himself, once in a 
 way, be chastised with scorpions. 
 
 And inasmuch as reason does not deny to men 
 this much of outlet for fundamental instinct, 
 there is the less need to fear that the most scrupu- 
 lous and habitual reconsideration of our creeds and 
 convictions will weaken our will for good. It is 
 one of the many verbal fallacies of the age to say 
 that faith in one's cause is the main condition of 
 success ; and it is one of the many ethical errors 
 which go with lax reasoning to hold that faith 
 makes any cause respectable. Even if the 
 triumphs won by enthusiastic and convinced men 
 had been won over men irresolute and uncon- 
 vinced, the ethical justification would be all to 
 seek. The triumph of Islam is surely a rude 
 ideal to hold up before civilised eyes. But the 
 triumphs of unwavering conviction turn out to 
 have been won over equal conviction. It is not 
 recorded even by tradition that Goliath went out 
 doubtfully against David : the moral drawn there 
 is different. And it is even recorded that on the 
 eve of the Battle of Hastings the Normans were 
 diffident and reflective, and the doomed Saxons 
 confiient of victory. To doubt before acting is 
 precisely the best way to escape the mishap of 
 having to doubt in the middle of your act. 
 
 But let us not put the motive in the sense of 
 final utility, though the sense of final utility is 
 
Concerning Regeneration. 58 
 
 always the final standard, provided only you hold 
 it high enough. Let us put the motive for our- 
 selves in our own sense of the rightness of the 
 self-denial which arrests the first cravings of im- 
 pulse, whether towards lawless asseveration, law- 
 less denunciation, or lawless denial, and makes 
 self-doubt an abiding principle, even as the 
 ancient pietist sought to do with self-mortifica- 
 tion. Our age, with all its faults, is surely as 
 capable of a sane ideal as any that went before ; 
 and the ideal of making Reason commensurate 
 with action, and of making each day a conscious 
 new beginning in the higher life, is surely fittest 
 for the age in which above all others every day 
 brings forth a new thing. The higher life has 
 lagged sadly behind the lower : we do and ex- 
 perience so much that the science of the whole 
 is obscured by the ever enlarging sciences of the 
 details. But when we see that there is no other 
 salvation for man than that which he can com- 
 pass by his own thought, we shall surely rise to 
 the height of that great argument, and seek in a 
 new way to make a new world by being perpetu- 
 ally new men. 
 
ON COMPROMISE. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 (1895.) 
 
 It is one of the odd chances in the fortunes of 
 words that the verb " to compromise " has at 
 once the meaning- of making oneself safe and of 
 putting oneself in danger. A charge or a dispute 
 is *' compromised " by concession, and a man is 
 ** compromised ** by being connected with some- 
 thing questionable. Can it be, one sometimes 
 wonders, that between these significations there 
 is a certain subtle ethical relationship, as well as 
 that mere train of associated ideas which bridges 
 the endless divisions in the senses of sophisticated 
 terms? The problem is an old one ; and despite 
 much capable discussion it is perhaps as well 
 worth reconsidering to-day as ever. 
 
 A more eloquent and earnest handling of it 
 there certainly cannot be than the well-known 
 treatise devoted to it by a distinguished living 
 statesman, whom some consider to have given up 
 to politics what was meant for literature, if not 
 to party what was meant for mankind. Mr. 
 Morley*s brilliant essay ' On Compromise * was 
 written more than twenty years ago ; and in the 
 interval he has been able to put his principles to 
 some very shrewd practical tests. In his case, 
 as in some others, it is natural to wish the per- 
 formance of youth could be, if not re-written, at 
 
 ( 54 ) 
 
On Compromise. 55 
 
 least commented, by maturity. For some men 
 the mere publication of certain opinions early in 
 life is something of a security for their remain- 
 ing of those opinions, as having given hostages 
 to criticism, so to speak ; but in these days it can- 
 not be said that such austerity of continuance is 
 either much invited by example or strongly en- 
 forced by public sentiment. Twenty years ago,* 
 Mr. Morley himself endorsed Mill's remarkf that 
 ** this is an age of loud disputes and weak convic- 
 tions '* ; and, supposing that to be true, we do 
 not seem to have developed very much as regards 
 our convictions, whatever may be the case with 
 our disputes. However that may be, it must have 
 struck some of Mr. Morley 's appreciative readers 
 as somewhat remarkable that he was lately intro- 
 duced to the attention of the religious world in the 
 capacity of a performer, rather than a student, 
 in compromise. The story, as given to the world 
 by a Nonconformist clergyman, is that the right 
 hon. gentleman, while staying as the guest of an 
 orthodox nobleman, was told that in consideration 
 of his opinions he could of course dispense with 
 attendance at family prayers in the morning ; 
 whereupon he answered to the effect that nothing 
 better pleased him than to begin the day with a 
 sense of being in communion of sympathy with 
 those about him ; and that accordingly he would 
 
 * ' On Compromise,* 1874. 
 
 t * Autobiography,' p. 160. Mill's precise words were : 
 *^ generally weak convictions". 
 
56 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 gladly attend prayers. Such a private arrange- 
 ment would be no business of ours were it not 
 that it has been admiringly made known to all 
 the world by the clergyman in question, who sees 
 in the episode a grace of character almost atoning 
 for scepticism, and warmly commends it to the 
 attention of mankind. It thus becomes, as it 
 were, a broad hint to the rest of us who are of 
 little faith, in our humbler spheres, to go and do 
 likewise ; and it is not clear that the virtue of the 
 example is supposed to be confined to participation 
 in family prayers. The case seems distinctly rele- 
 vant to the theme of the treatise I have referred 
 to ; and it seems to suggest a reconsideration of 
 that. 
 
 It may not, perhaps, be unduly presumptuous 
 to suggest that the subject may profitably be 
 handled on another method. Mr. Morley well 
 remarked^ in his essay that the modern use of 
 what is called the Historic Method has a good 
 deal to do with habits of compromise. He calls 
 that one of the '* profounder causes of weakened 
 aspiration and impoverished moral energy, and of 
 the substitution of latitudinarian acquiescence and 
 faltering conviction for the whole-hearted assur- 
 ance of better times ". Without committing our- 
 selves just yet to the view that people in general 
 are so much less whole-hearted to-day than of old, 
 we may readily agree with him that * 'the abuse of 
 
 :tEd. 1888, p. 28, et seq. 
 
On Compromise. 57 
 
 this [the Historic] method, and an unauthorised 
 extension and interpretation of its conclusions, 
 are likely to have had something to do with the 
 enervation of opinion ** in some cases. '' In the 
 last century,'/ he remarks,* " men asked of a be- 
 lief or a story. Is it true? We now ask. How 
 did men come to take it for true? In short, the 
 relations among social phenomena which now en- 
 gage most attention are relations of original 
 source, rather than those of actual consistency in 
 theory and actual fitness in practice. The de- 
 votees of the current method are more concerned 
 with the pedigree and genealogical connexions of 
 a custom or an idea than with its own proper 
 goodness or badness, its strength or its weak- 
 ness.*' 
 
 It might perhaps here be noted that the new 
 method is not after all so very new. As the best 
 biographer of Burke might have remembered, he 
 last century set the fashion of looking to pedi- 
 gree and genealogy rather than to truth in prin- 
 ciples. ** It makes all the difference in the 
 world,'* says Whately in the sentence Mr. Morley 
 puts as the motto to his book, ** whether we put 
 Truth in the first place or the second place." 
 Burke certainly sought to put it in the second 
 place, if not in the third. But the fact remains 
 that in our own day a good many people apply 
 his process, with more coolness, but perhaps not 
 
 31. 
 
68 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 with less effect, to present-day problems. And 
 whereas Mr. Morley of old met this abuse of the 
 Historic Method — this tendency to compromise 
 about a delusion because it has a good pedigree 
 — with the method of direct moral appeal ; and 
 whereas the method of direct moral appeal does 
 not seem to have been very successful in practice, 
 there is perhaps room for another. I would sug- 
 gest the Economic Method. A few years ago 
 we heard a great deal about the correction of Poli- 
 tical Economy by the Historic Method. Yet al- 
 ready, I believe, the tables are so far turned that, 
 while Economics may still be partly expounded 
 through history — as indeed it always was — we are 
 now interpreting history by Economics. Not that 
 that is a new expedient either ; but it is now be- 
 ing consciously and deliberately applied to every 
 stage of human evolution. The first large fact in 
 life is nutrition : nutrition then is the first large 
 fact in sociology. It will not do to say that the 
 method of ** economic determinism '*, as it is 
 called, is the whole of sociological interpretation. 
 No one key will open all the locks of the human 
 heart. The trouble about all methods is that they 
 tend to make methodists. But if you are the 
 master of your method, and not its servant, it 
 may avail you for much. 
 
 Let us now ask, then, how Compromise, good 
 and bad, arises among us ; and how it affects life. 
 It is at once obvious that in large part it is a 
 necessity of social existence. "All combination," 
 
On Compromise. 59 
 
 says Mill truly, ^ ** is compromise : it is the sacri- 
 fice of some portion of individual will for a com- 
 mon purpose/' And combination is a very wide 
 word. We may say that there cannot be so much 
 as a dinner-party without compromise, to say 
 nothing of political parties, churches, govern- 
 ments. Compromise, then, is so far a matter of 
 simple common-sense ; and insofar as the broad 
 divisions of sects and parties go, it is reasonable 
 to say that there is too little of it rather than too 
 much. The phenomenon, for instance, of two 
 great political parties pulling dead against each 
 other is not creditable to the collective wisdom of 
 a self-governing people ; and we may hope that 
 such w^ooden and inconsiderate opposition will 
 gradually yield to the play of crossing forces, of 
 new subdivisions of party. What we want, as 
 regards public conduct, is compromise all over 
 the field of activity ; not merely the compromise 
 involved in the combination of Welsh and Irish to 
 secure Disestablishment and Home Rule, or of 
 Liberal Unionist and Conservative to prevent 
 them, but the spirit of compromise as among the 
 directly opposing forces, who most need it. We 
 must all in a sense live together : let us do so as 
 peaceably as possible. 
 
 And here it is to be observed that people who 
 are all for compromise to-day in other directions 
 where it is not at all as desirable in the interests 
 
 ^ ' Dissertations and Discussions/ i, 165. 
 
60 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 of civilisation, are curiously laudatory of the un- 
 compromising courses of other men in other 
 times. Even Mr. Morley, who in general sees 
 matters political with uncommon sanity, goes 
 somewhat out of his way to praise some historic 
 types whom in his own day he would have found 
 *'gey ill to live wi' '\ as Carlyle's mother is falsely 
 said to have said of her son. 
 
 " To what quarter," he asks,* " in the large historic fir- 
 mament can we turn our eyes with such certainty of being 
 stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human life and 
 the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated 
 by its seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits 
 whom the protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal re- 
 sponsibility brought to the front in Germany in the 
 sixteenth century, and in England and Scotland in the 
 seventeenth? It is not their fanaticism, still less is it their 
 theology, which makes the great Puritan chiefs of England 
 and the stern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our 
 sight. It is the fact that they sought truth and ensued it, 
 not thinking of the practicable nor cautiously counting 
 majorities and minorities, but each man pondering and 
 searching, so * as ever in the great Task-master's eye'." 
 
 I respectfully demur to this estimate. For my 
 own part I can feel more stirred and elevated by 
 other contemplations. The personages in ques- 
 tion refused compromise where compromise was 
 right — that is, not in doctrine but in action ; and 
 the end of their action was to throw back progress 
 of every description. It was because they mis- 
 carried that other men grew comparatively indif- 
 ferent. I do not for a moment say they are to be 
 held up to odium on that account : they belonged 
 
 * ' On Compromise,' p. 113. 
 
On Compromise, 61 
 
 to their day and acted up to their lights, or some 
 of their lights ; but at least we are not to single 
 them out for a special praise which we deny to 
 other men just as sincere in their mistakes. Our 
 business is to study them and learn by them, not 
 to praise them, save for the courage which they 
 shared with their enemies. And the remarkable 
 leniency with which they are often estimated must 
 in some part be set down to a tendency which we 
 have to deal with as a dubious development of 
 compromise — the tendency to regard sincerity as 
 a very fine thing in the days of Martin Luther 
 and Oliver Cromwell or the early Christians, but 
 as usefully superseded nowadays by other quali- 
 ties. Social law is really not thus precarious. If 
 it would be wrong for us to go to civil war to-day 
 over Home Rule, we can hardly acclaim Hamp- 
 den and Cromwell for resorting to it over ship- 
 money, especially when we remember how Crom- 
 well finally managed his own taxation. An essay 
 on Compromise by Cromwell in the last year of 
 his life, could he but have found leisure and the 
 spirit of contemplation, would have been a price- 
 less human document. As it is, the lesson of his 
 career is just this, that if you will not compromise 
 with other people over non-essentials you are 
 likely to end by compromising on essentials with 
 yourself. 
 
 But now let us turn to those forms of compro- 
 mise which by implication we are all agreed in 
 holding to be abstractly bad — all of us, that is, 
 
62 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 who do not practise them — the forms of compro- 
 mise which Mr. Morley attacked in his essay, 
 twenty years ago. First of all, is it the case that 
 these forms of compromise are peculiarly modern, 
 or that this generation is peculiarly given to 
 latitudinarianism and insincerity and moral im- 
 poverishment and all the rest of it? I have al- 
 ready hinted a doubt on the subject ; and when I 
 go back to Mr. Morley *s teacher and predecessor, 
 John Stuart Mill, and find him in his youth diag- 
 nosing his age in the same fashion, my doubt 
 deepens. " There is a great increase of hu- 
 manity," wrote young Mill,* " a decline of 
 bigotry, as well as of arrogance and the conceit 
 of caste, among our conspicuous classes ; but 
 there is, to say the least, no increase of shining 
 ability, and a very marked decrease of vigor and 
 energy. With all the advantages of this age . . 
 . . there can scarcely be pointed out in the Euro- 
 pean annals any stirring times which have brought 
 so little that is distinguished, either morally or in- 
 tellectually, to the surface." That was written in 
 1836, nearly forty years before Mr. Morley 's 
 essay ; so that those '' better times " of '' whole- 
 hearted assurance " to which Mr. Morley points 
 back must be somewhat remote and elusive. 
 When we go back a hundred years, they seem to 
 be still in the enchanted distance — with Cromwell 
 and Luther and the early Christians. And, grant- 
 
 *' Dissertations and Discussions,' i, 171. 
 
On Compromise, 68 
 
 ing the sincerity of Luther and Cromwell, it can 
 hardly be said, after all, that they represent the 
 high-water mark of intellectual as distinguished 
 from temperamental energy, or even that they are 
 so absolutely unparalleled in modern times in re- 
 spect of fidelity to conviction. The trouble is 
 that the moderns who have been strenuously faith- 
 ful to their convictions get overlooked as being 
 rebels and blasphemers. Richard Carlile, who 
 suffered nine years' imprisonment for freethink- 
 ing propaganda — such men, and the men of the 
 French Commune, are not counted for righteous- 
 ness to this much-abused *' age ". Yet here too 
 were energy and sincerity. May it not then be 
 that human nature is after all not so vitally 
 altered ; and that what has happened is only a 
 changed application of energy and a variation in 
 the shapes of insincerity? May we not say that 
 Mill answered himself when he wrote only a year 
 later : 
 
 "Whatever man has been, man may be; whatever of 
 heroic the heroic ages, whatever of chivalrous the romantic 
 ages have produced, is still possible, nay, still is ; and a 
 hero of Plutarch may exist amidst all the pettinesses of 
 modern civilisation, and with all the cultivation and re- 
 finement, and the analysing and questioning spirit of the 
 modern European mind."* 
 
 To clear up the matter, let us come to those 
 forms of compromise which Mr. Morley assailed 
 in his essay, nnd consider how they arise. He 
 
 *Jd., p. 2^^. 
 
64 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 specifies three provinces of compromise,! the first 
 being in the formation of opinions, the second in 
 the expression of them, the third in the effort to 
 realise them. Of these the first may for practical 
 purposes be set aside, the issue involved being not 
 one of compromise in the ordinary sense. There 
 can hardly be compromise in the formation of 
 opinions. What Mr. Morley condemns in this 
 connexion is rather mental indolence and prejudice 
 than anything of the nature of compromise. We 
 are practically narrowed down to the two points 
 of expression of opinion, and action on opinion ; 
 and on the latter head we are agreed that general 
 public action is clearly a proper field for compro- 
 mise. 
 
 Where compromise is open and recognised ; 
 where there is no deception about it ; where it is 
 admittedly a means to a common good, it is really 
 a good means up to the limits of our enlighten- 
 ment. The real ground of debate, the sphere in 
 which compromise tends to shade off from pru- 
 dence to duplicity, from strategy to cowardice, is 
 in the matter of the expression of opinion, taking 
 that phrase to cover not only speech and acquies- 
 cence, but such action as is specially an implication 
 of a particular opinion, as when, say, a man joins 
 unbelievingly in a religious act, not in order to 
 save his life but merely to save his purse or his 
 reputation. In matters of positive or political 
 
 t Essay cited, p. 94. 
 
On Compromise. 65 
 
 action, we may reasonably agree to yield some- 
 thing in order to save something else, always as- 
 suming that what we yield is not another person's 
 right ; but in matters of simple opinion and the 
 avowal of it, on subjects of the first importance, 
 the Tightness of compromise is a matter of doubt 
 at almost every step. 
 
 A few points may be instantly waived. No in- 
 structed person disputes that as regards expres- 
 sion of opinion there are fit and seemly restraints 
 as regards times and places and persons. No 
 one has the right to thrust unwelcome reasonings 
 on his fellows without the excuse of repelling a 
 similar aggression ; and no one does well to go 
 out of his way to disturb, with such reasonings, 
 minds which can get nothing but disturbance from 
 them. It is quite unnecessary, generally speak- 
 ing, to press these considerations on rationalists, 
 save in the case of young enthusiasts, whose 
 errors in the matter are those of youth and en- 
 thusiasm, rather than of rationalism. The great 
 bulk of really aggressive and meddlesome obtru- 
 sion of opinion has always come, and probably 
 will always come, from religious people. In the 
 third century. Christians felt called upon to pro- 
 '^^test when Pagans said ** Jove bless you " after a 
 sneeze. Modern unbelief is less meticulous. The 
 truth is that just as there is little compromise 
 where there ought to be most — in the adjustment 
 of conflicting ideals of joint or public action ; so 
 there is endless compromise where there ought 
 
66 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 to be least — in the avowal by word and deed of 
 opinions on questions which need not and should 
 not affect joint public action, save in the special 
 matter of the propaganda of those particular 
 opinions. The ideal of civic life, the life of col- 
 lective self-government, is peace and co-operation, 
 to the end of social progress : the ideal of the in- 
 tellectual life, as distinguished from the life of 
 civic action, is continuous criticism, to the end 
 of intellectual and social progress alike ; and the 
 combined and complete ideal is, the reconciliation 
 of constant conflict in opinion with constant 
 amenity in action and intercourse. Strife in 
 opinion there must always be ; that is the one 
 form of strife to which mankind seems inevitably 
 committed. The problem is to let it play through 
 intellect and not through malignant passion. 
 
 But we no sooner ** see the better way and 
 approve '*, in the words of Ovid, than we run the 
 risk of ** following the worse '\ And the risk is 
 the more grave, and the evil the more persistent, 
 because it really rests on economic conditions. 
 Mr. Morley, you will remember, deals w^ell and 
 forcibly with the many arguments which people 
 offer to justify dissimulation and reticence in re- 
 gard to popular beliefs which they are quite sure 
 are false. The arguments in question mostly re- 
 solve themselves into three : (i) that beliefs may 
 be false and yet not do harm in proportion to their 
 falsity ; (2) that to attack such false beliefs may 
 do more harm than good ; (3) that false beliefs 
 
On Compromise, 67 
 
 will die out if left alone, the true ones being ** in 
 the air *'. Now, it may seem an exaggeration to 
 say, but I do say it with confidence, that each one 
 of these three arguments is put forward not by 
 reason of a real or freely reached conviction, but 
 half-heartedly and by way of finding an excuse for 
 a line of conduct not cordially and spontaneously 
 chosen. Mr. Morley's counter arguments are 
 mostly unanswerable, and need hardly be re- 
 peated. I do not believe that anyone sitting down 
 to make a scientific investigation, uncoerced ^y 
 private interest or personal position, will dispute 
 Mr. Morley's contention that the acquiescence in 
 all manner of bad reasoning tends to promote bad 
 reasoning and all the ills that flow from it ; that 
 there is no security for the welfare of a truth save 
 what is given by spreading it ; and that those who 
 begin by dissembling on one point stand a fair 
 chance of becoming dissemblers on others. The 
 instinct of veracity is not so hardy in man that it 
 can safely be kept indoors, unexercised and un- 
 breathed. 
 
 All this is so obvious that it need not be en- 
 larged upon ; for in point of fact these very argu- 
 ments are the proof that the instinct of veracity 
 has suffered in those who urge them. We have 
 only to imagine the turning of the discussion to 
 some scientific instead of a theological topic, in 
 order to see how unreal they are. Who ever pro- 
 poses to compromise on the subject of the law of 
 ^Gravitation? If the old theory of dew can be 
 
68 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 shown to be wrong, if the nebular hypothesis be 
 supposed to be open to a new criticism, if a new 
 theory of electricity be brought forward, does any- 
 one then suggest that error may be left to die of 
 itself, that a false theory of electricity can do no 
 harm? It may indeed be fairly argued that a 
 theory of electricity has no bearing on morals, 
 whereas a religious doctrine may have ; but the 
 general arguments about the inherent mortality 
 of error must hold good in science if they hold 
 good in philosophy. And while many people 
 argue for reticence on the subject of the general 
 belief in a future state, lest by upsetting beliefs 
 we may upset moral principles connected with 
 those beliefs, nobody nowadays seems to hesitate 
 on the same ground about upsetting beliefs in 
 ghosts and evil spirits and even in eternal torment, 
 though every one of these beliefs has notoriously 
 been connected with moral doctrine. Let us 
 make an end of a fashion of dialectic that is really 
 worn out ; and let us do it the more readily inas- 
 much as the true explanation of it all is a thing to 
 be stated more in sorrow than in anger. The 
 truth is that men find all manner of arguments for 
 not speaking out about false and absurd religious 
 doctrines, because for so many men the act of 
 speaking out is pecuniarily or otherwise dangerous. 
 The explanation, in fact, is economic. If there 
 is more compromise to-day than formerly, more 
 make-believe and timorous silence on the subject 
 of the popular creed, it is because on the one hand 
 
On Co7npromise, 69 
 
 there are more people who do not believe the 
 popular creed, while on the other hand these 
 people are not yet numerous enough, or do not 
 know themselves to be numerous enough, to ven- 
 ture on the open avowal of their opinions and face 
 the pecuniary loss that may accrue. The ** nation 
 of shopkeepers '' must in a measure have a shop- 
 keeping ethic ; and so long as the majority are 
 believers, and as such are disposed to injure or 
 boycott in trade those who criticise their creed, 
 so long the shopkeeping nation is likely to be per- 
 meated by a habit of unworthy compromise on 
 the matter on which there ought to be least com- 
 promise. And mere moral appeal, I repeat, seems 
 likely to do little good, save indeed in so far as it 
 makes new rationalists. When people feel a dis- 
 tinct economic pressure, whether they be shop- 
 keepers or professional men, they will in general 
 yield to that pressure ; and they can effectively 
 meet moral appeals by asking whether it is right 
 for them to risk starvation for their wives and 
 children. One of three things must happen : (i) 
 either the economic conditions must be funda- 
 mentally changed, which is not a thing that can 
 happen soon, whether or not we want it to hap- 
 pen ; or else (2) the religious majority must be 
 civilised to the point of abandoning the desire to 
 injure the anti-religious minority ; or else (3) the 
 religious majority must be reduced to a minority 
 by propaganda — a process which of course is diffi- 
 cult precisely in proportion to the amount of the 
 
70 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 forces making for compromise. In any case, the 
 principle of economic determinism is the main key 
 to the situation. 
 
 If it be replied to all this that it is not mere 
 economic need or self-interest that causes most of 
 the acts of compromise on religious questions, but 
 that love of moral peace is the main cause of the 
 conformity of so many educated people to creeds 
 in which they do not believe, I point to the strifes 
 of politics, which show small concern for moral 
 peace. And if it be urged that the amount of open 
 conflict on political questions, again, proves that 
 economic pressure is not so forcible as I have said, 
 I answer that that is really the crowning proof 
 of the proposition. Even on political issues, in- 
 deed, there is a great deal of compromise on 
 economic grounds by people who fear to lose com- 
 mercially by openness, to say nothing of the 
 amount of make-believe by people who have no 
 convictions, and can assume any that are con- 
 venient. But the mass of the electorate, pro- 
 bably, avows its convictions, and does not unduly 
 compromise as regards the expression of opinion. 
 And why? Because, to start with, the numbers 
 are so great on each side that in general the risks 
 of avowal are likely to be balanced by the gains 
 of avowal ; and because, for the rest, political 
 parties are kept alive by the chronic pressure of 
 problems affecting the economic welfare of the 
 people. Men are naturally more ready to fight 
 for their pecuniary interest than for a mere criti- 
 
On Compromise. 71 
 
 cism of a doctrine which only intellectually bears 
 on life. Therefore it is easy to make a party for 
 or against a political proposal. Therefore there 
 is less economic pressure towards dissimulation, 
 towards compromise, than in the case of a mainly 
 intellectual movement. Only when sects are al- 
 ready large, and when their opinions — as is the 
 way with religious sects — are held as passions and 
 prejudices, can they be looked-to to energise for 
 a doctrine as apart from an interest. 
 
 There is indeed one apparent exception to this 
 rule, and that is the case of a movement of reli- 
 gious excitement, such as was the Wesleyan 
 movement in the lifetime of its founder, and such 
 as may have been the Christian movement at 
 times in the early centuries. Here we have a sect 
 taking shape, and its adherents facing ridicule and 
 refusing all compromise. But even here the eco- 
 nomic principle holds good. These new sects are 
 formed among the classes that have least to lose 
 by heterodoxy. As in ancient times the slave 
 and the proletary were the first adherents of Chris- 
 tianity, their opinions being disregarded and con- 
 temned by their masters, so last century the then 
 lowest grades of workers were free to follow the 
 cult that attracted them, because their masters 
 either cared little what they believed, or thought 
 the religious form of excitement less harmful than 
 other possible forms. Broadly speaking, the 
 workers in the mass are least given to dissimula- 
 tion and compromise in these matters, because 
 
72 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 their incomes are least affected by avowal of here- 
 tical opinions of any sort. And as regards the 
 early Christians it seems clear that, while they 
 were in large numbers moved by an appeal which 
 was really on the level of their previous culture 
 and religious emotion, and when so moved were 
 often ready to face martyrdom as Asiatics and 
 other half developed races are known to have 
 been in past ages and are now ; at the same time 
 very large numbers were attracted to the Church 
 by the systematic alms-giving it was enabled to 
 practise through the gifts of those superstitious 
 rich adherents who gradually multiplied as time 
 went on. Thus the economic key yields the gist 
 of the explanation in the cases where compromise 
 appears to be little in favor, as in the cases where 
 it is much in favor ; and the double test confirms 
 the theory. 
 
 And now we have the decisive light on that 
 other problem as to the alleged predominance of 
 spontaneous energy and uncompromising direct- 
 ness in previous ages as compared with our own. 
 Looking at the movements of Cromwell and of 
 Luther in the light of our own political move- 
 ments, we can see that there was really no pecu- 
 liar stress of conscientiousness in those ancient 
 outbreaks. They were, indeed, more violent, 
 either resorting to or contemplating physical force 
 at an early stage, whereas in our day we more and 
 more tend to regard physical force as the worst 
 of all means of settling or carrying on disputes. 
 
On Compromise. 73 
 
 But the total amount of energy has not propor- 
 tionally fallen off, though in our day much more 
 energy is consumed in the struggle for existence, 
 leaving less for political explosion ; and as re- 
 gards the moral courage involved, the case must 
 now be entirely restated. Neither in the resis- 
 tance of the English Parliament to Charles nor in 
 that of Luther to the Pope was there any lonely 
 courage to speak of, — that courage of isolated 
 men and groups which is in the warfare of opinion 
 what Napoleon held '' two-o'clock-in-the-morn- 
 ing-courage *' to be in the wars of the flesh. 
 Luther had by him and behind him plenty of sym- 
 pathisers and supporters from the first. The 
 economic principle had already wrought for him : 
 many Germans were tired of paying Papal tri- 
 bute, and beginning to be disgusted with the 
 newer expedients to fill the papal coffers. Had 
 the Pope professed to give indulgences as rewards 
 either for penance or for merit or for church- 
 going, the essential absurdity of the proposition 
 would never have aroused a movement of reforma- 
 tion as did the act of selling the indulgences for 
 money, though the absurdity and the immorality 
 would have been just the same. As it was, 
 Luther had half his world with him either at the 
 outset or very soon after. 
 
 And so with the English Rebellion. The anti- 
 Romanist feeling which underlay the opposition to 
 the king's demands was already fully developed. 
 What of special innovating courage had ever been 
 
74 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 involved on the Protestant side had been displayed 
 by the brutal despot who overthrew the Romish 
 Church in England ; and by the horde of mere 
 plunderers who aided him in the work. Thus the 
 Reformation itself had an economic basis : greed 
 of nobles and other laymen for church lands. On 
 that basis English Protestantism arose. And in 
 so far as other feelings than established Protes- 
 tant zeal were involved in the armed resistance to 
 Charles, the leaders of the rebellion had an abun- 
 dance of support and countenance from the first. 
 Whole districts co-operated : Cromwell never 
 stood alone for any cause, whether freedom from 
 fresh taxation or freedom from religious oppres- 
 sion. Two large political parties stood arrayed 
 against each other, and where there ought to have 
 been compromise there was none ; just as to-day, 
 when happily we have learned to do without civil 
 war, there is still far too little compromise in 
 practical politics, where compromise Is most 
 needed. And the human nature which then 
 seemed to refuse compromise or dissimulation 
 over questions of creed was the same pyschic 
 nature, barring modifications, as the human 
 nature which to-day plays fast and loose with reli- 
 gious sincerity on economic pressure. Taxation 
 and religion were in Cromwell's day the main mat- 
 ter of politics ; economic pressure operated mainly 
 through royal taxation, which was the more 
 strenuously resisted because commerce and indus- 
 try were still primitive. In the evolved industrial 
 
On Compromise. IS 
 
 state, economic pressure is manifold and in part 
 avoidable by conformity ; that is the difference. 
 It is not that men are grown spontaneously in- 
 sincere, though there was a distinct development 
 of insincerity and indifferentism in the age after 
 the great collapse of Puritanism, which had been 
 led by zeal from headlong civil war to anarchy, 
 to despotism, to destruction, till its every politi- 
 cal principle was belied and its every ideal stulti- 
 fied. Then the economic pressure set in the direc- 
 tion of the new movement of power and politics ; 
 and the average man resorted to compromise very 
 much as had been the case under Henry the 
 Eighth, when the conjunction of tyrannous 
 power and lay greed seem to have produced as 
 much of cowardly submission and prudent obeis- 
 ance among Englishmen as has ever been seen in 
 England since. What Protestant now acclaims 
 Sir Thomas More? A late Protestant historian 
 loudly applauds his execution. But Sir Thomas 
 More exhibited a lonely courage of the rarest kind, 
 beside which even the courage of Luther is not 
 conspicuous. Clearly we had need revise our 
 estimates of the past, of its sincerities and audaci- 
 ties, in the light of an impartial historical and 
 social science. 
 
 We have reached at this stage, I hope, one scien- 
 tific though simple result, in the view that those 
 forms of insincerity and sham conformity which 
 were so eloquently and justly condemned by Mr. 
 Morley are to be explained as products of certain 
 
76 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 economic conditions, in relation with modern in- 
 tellectual movements, not as signs of any arbitrary 
 or mysterious moral degeneration. And as those 
 economic conditions do not seem readily alterable 
 in any direct way, it does not appear that we may 
 look for a speedy reform on the moral side. That 
 conclusion may not unreasonably be regarded by 
 those who agree with it as giving a new motive 
 towards the alteration of the economic conditions. 
 But it is not our business here to advocate or 
 discuss such changes in detail ; and it remains for 
 us to ask ourselves how, ethically speaking, we 
 should adjust ourselves to the situation sketched 
 — those of us who are concerned about its 
 aspect. Is it really so little hopeful? If the 
 economic conditions are hard to alter directly, 
 may they not be altered to some extent indirectly? 
 Without venturing on any prediction, I incline 
 to say that in one way they might be. I have 
 said that the minority compromise in matters of 
 religious opinion, either because they are so small 
 a minority or because they think they are a small 
 minority. Now, they are probably not really so 
 small a minority to-day as many of them are apt 
 to suppose. Unluckily, the very fear of speak- 
 ing-out prevents them from ascertaining their 
 strength : they are weak because they are un- 
 organised. Did they but give each other mutual 
 support, they would probably find, at least in the 
 towns, that they could defy the economic pres- 
 sure set up by bigotry ; and the bigots in turn 
 
On Compromise. 77 
 
 might learn sooner the propriety of compromise 
 in the matter of business intercourse where com- 
 promise in the sense of mutual toleration should 
 be the rule. In rural districts where there is much 
 religious fervor, there is of course little hope of 
 a pleasurable life for an avowed unbeliever ; and 
 in this respect it is found that the collective bigotry 
 of dissenting populations can compare with that 
 of the worst of the State clergy. But in the 
 towns it seems certain that there is a steady de- 
 cline of real orthodoxy, which indeed, like the un- 
 real, mainly rests on the economic fact that it is 
 the means of livelihood of a whole army of speci- 
 ally trained men. Mr. Morley took the unbeliev- 
 ing priest as an extreme type of the compromis- 
 ing citizen ; and it seems certain that unbelieving 
 priests are more numerous every year ; that is to 
 say, there are every year, apparently, more priests 
 who find themselves without real belief in the doc- 
 trines they are hired to propound, and who salve 
 their consciences by the argument that good may 
 be done even by means of a false faith. These 
 men too are under economic pressure : it is so 
 hard to win a livelihood otherwise. The more 
 need for combination and organisation among 
 those who feel that a false faith, preached when 
 known to be false, must needs work far more de- 
 moralisation than good to mankind. 
 
 Such organisation should involve no element of 
 sectarianism, no lessening of public co-operation 
 of all kinds in matters non-religious. The atti- 
 
78- Essays in Ethics^ 
 
 tude of those Christians who will not even do the 
 work of a Peace Society without introducing the 
 dogmas and pretensions of their creed into the 
 society's propaganda is clearly not to be imitated. 
 Men may work for right reason as against reli- 
 gion, without setting themselves apart in matters 
 political. Nay, there may even be organisation 
 of rationalists for the purpose of mutual counten- 
 ance and the promotion of sincerity without add- 
 ing to these the work of propaganda, which is 
 often difficult to agree upon. It might separately 
 promote, for instance, openness and straightfor- 
 wardness in such matters as the christening of 
 children, their school training in dogma, the cele- 
 bration of marriage, and the ceremony of burial. 
 In all of these things there is grievous and need- 
 less compromise. The religious schooling of 
 rationalists' children in particular is a most seri- 
 ous trouble. Thousands of parents who individu- 
 ally dislike the training thus given, yet allow their 
 children to be subjected to it because they know 
 that to be isolated and marked off from and nick- 
 named by its fellows is a painful trial to a child. 
 To save it from this trial, the child is subjected 
 to the probable future pain of having to reject be- 
 liefs forced upon it in childhood, to say nothing 
 of the moral and intellectual darkening of the 
 growing intelligence by the daily inculcation of 
 doctrines false in fact, wrong in ethics, and ab- 
 surd in the light of reason. Yet if all the rational 
 parents could but combine to withdraw their chil- 
 
On Compromise, 79 
 
 dren simultaneously, as the law allows, from re- 
 ligious instruction in the public schools, their chil- 
 dren would not be isolated ; while the others, no 
 longer able to persecute the little heretic, might 
 thus far be civilised to an extent to which re- 
 ligion and parental training have as yet failed to 
 carry them. 
 
 Such an organisation of parents has lately been 
 proposed, and no more important purpose could 
 be set out. Once begun, the movement might 
 successfully proceed to discountenance those end- 
 less weak conformities to superstition in the cere- 
 monies of marriage and burial which give priest- 
 hoods their most enduring source of strength. It 
 is fair to ask of all public men who profess to 
 stand for rational morality that they should set 
 their faces against these things. An eminent liv- 
 ing historian, Mr. Bryce, has well written that 
 ** our sloth or timidity, not seeing that whatever 
 is false must also be bad, maintains in being what 
 once was good long after it has become help- 
 less and hopeless '' ;^ and there must be thou- 
 sands of readers who have approved of that say- 
 ing. But what do they, or the leaders of en- 
 lightened opinion, do to act on the principle that 
 whatever is false must also be bad? We have 
 seen Mr. Huxley buried with religious rites, and 
 an epitaph put on his grave expressing a theistic 
 belief which he had repudiated. We see Mr. 
 
 * * Holy Roman Empire,' 8th ed., p. 357. 
 
80 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 Morley extolled for attending the family prayers of 
 the nobility — an institution in itself surely the 
 most flimsy of all English forms of ceremoni- 
 alism, with its daily half-hour of vain parade of 
 equality before Omnipotence, in the face of the 
 most rigid dominion and subjection and moral 
 separation of castes all the rest of the day. And 
 we cannot here say that it is economic pressure 
 that is the proximate cause of the improper com- 
 promise made. The teachers, it would seem, 
 have need to be taught, the custodians of moral 
 principle to be supervised. Many of their lapses, 
 it may be, are to be set down as concessions to 
 the weak. But while concession to the weak is 
 always a better thing than concession to Philis- 
 tinism and wealth, it is none the less dangerous. 
 We hear much of the harm of specially helping 
 the weak to survive ; but there is much more 
 need to guard against the evil of letting their 
 opinions rule. We want a new intellectual ethic 
 at least as much as a new social ethic. 
 
 It is a comfort, in view of these things, to re- 
 member that the workers, with all their hard- 
 ships, yet retain that single moral advantage 
 which we before contemplated — the advantage of 
 being free from most of the temptations to un- 
 worthy conformity which beset other ranks ; and 
 that they may thus do in the future for reason- 
 able beliefs what they have done in the past for 
 unreasonable. They have already, indeed, done 
 much, far more than the other classes, proportion- 
 
On Compromise. 81 
 
 ately to their culture. But their rendering of the 
 needed service to civilisation is visibly dependent 
 on their own success in winning economic well- 
 being, on which in turn so largely depends their 
 capacity for intellectual interests. Here again 
 the sociological lesson is clear and emphatic. And 
 when it is thus seen how all social movement, be 
 it progress or retrogression, is under the reign of 
 law, and how a knowledge of the law may make 
 possible the gradual reform of the conditions, 
 surely the bands of progress, where bands there 
 be, may take heart and hope. Surely the reasoned 
 precepts of science may be to them what, as Mil- 
 ton sings, the Dorian music was of old to warriors 
 who, 
 
 "instead of rage, 
 Deliberate valor breathed, firm and unmoved 
 With dread of death, to flight or foul retreat." 
 
 Surely these too may contain a power 
 
 "to mitigate and swage 
 With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase 
 Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow and pain." 
 
 Whether or not the race is thus to learn to 
 bring science and organisation to bear on its 
 highest concerns, there ever remains for the true 
 man the lot of the vanguard, with its old perils, 
 its old pains, and its old inalienable reward of 
 self respect. In some sense, indeed, it is almost 
 vain to count that new truth can ever have a 
 smooth course. When one verity has reached the 
 length of organised support, another must begin 
 
 G 
 
82 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 its way alone, if the great succession is to be main- 
 tained. For of most vital truths it is spiritually 
 true, as was fabled of old of the mythic children 
 predestined to found the realm of Rome, that they 
 are nursed into strength by a wolf, the wolf of pre- 
 judice, of enmity, of persecution. And so for the 
 new truth, to-day as of old, the precept to the 
 bringer-forth must be that of the poet-preacher : 
 
 "Cast the bantling on the rock's, 
 Suckle him with the she- wolf s teat ; 
 Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
 
 Power and speed be hands and feet.'* 
 
 For the sane reformer of to-day that is true 
 which was said to the fanatic of old : '* Paradise 
 lies under the shadow of swords.'* But that, of 
 course, is not a saying for all men ; and for the 
 simple and sincere citizen, we repeat, there always 
 remains the course of unpretending rectitude in 
 the light of well-established knowledge, and under 
 the protection and encouragement of the rational 
 co-operation of his fellow-thinkers. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF 
 MALIGNITY. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 (1890.) 
 
 It is Professor Bain, I think, who has introduced 
 into psychology^ the phrase ** the Pleasures of 
 Malevolence '\ which I doubt not has seemed to 
 many of you a strange theme. The phrase is a 
 perfectly serious one, and it points to a very im- 
 portant fact in human nature, though human 
 nature would fain repudiate the implication. The 
 eloquent Dr. Chalmers, as Professor Bain re- 
 minds us, sought to demonstrate! that male- 
 volence has no pleasures ; that he who hates, even 
 if he exult in the injury to his enemy, must be 
 conscious that all is not well within him ; and that 
 the tyrant who has the power to wreak to the 
 uttermost his every caprice of passion does but 
 vainly pursue a joy he cannot attain, and in 
 reality lives a life of agony. The purpose of this 
 thesis is the old one of showing that evil is some- 
 how alien to the scheme of things ; that we are 
 ** meant '\ somehow, to be good and kind ; and 
 that if we do ill by each other it must be our own 
 fault, since our natures were ** designed " for 
 benevolence only. The field of theology is 
 heaped with the wrecks of such arguments, which 
 
 * See his * The Emotions and the Will," 3rd ed., p. 187. 
 t In his dissertation on * The Inherent Misery of the 
 Vicious Affections'. 
 
 ( 83 ) 
 
84 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 vainly seek to reconcile contradictories, and gain 
 their point by the device of the schoolboy who in 
 an elaborate equation makes out, by the substitu- 
 tion of a plus for a minus, i=o. If there be de- 
 sign in Nature, we do what we were designed to 
 do : if we can frustrate the design of Omnipo- 
 tence, the datum of design is meaningless. We 
 must just then turn and take the old path to 
 truth — observation and reasoning. 
 
 Now, when we consider the matter strictly, 
 there is seen to be a certain measure of practical 
 truth in the declamation of Chalmers. It is true 
 that the feeling of positive hatred can never long 
 be a pleasurable one ; that ** all is not well within 
 us '' when we plan or long for vengeance ; and 
 that a condition of resentment is one of unrest and 
 wearing strain. If, as Coleridge says, "to be 
 wroth with one we love doth work like madness 
 in the brain,** no less true is it that all active 
 hate soon verges towards physiological distress. 
 But that is not at all a proof that malignant feel- 
 ing is incompatible with pleasure. The strain is 
 simply that inseparable from all intense feeling ; 
 and if it is ever great in the case of malevolent 
 feeling it is because that feeling has itself been 
 very strong. Have we not Shelley's sigh over the 
 burden of '* love's sad satiety," and Keats 's pic- 
 ture of 
 
 " Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh, 
 Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;" 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 85 
 
 and his avowal, 
 
 " Ay, in the very temple of Delight 
 Veil'd melancholy has her sovran shrine"? 
 
 Nay, is it not found that the extremer forms of 
 passion actually meet in unhinged organisms, so 
 that Milton's figure of ** lust hard by hate '' be- 
 comes a physiological truth? These facts are 
 plainly to be explained not by moral but by physio- 
 logical laws, and the general truth they prove is, 
 not that pain has been annexed to all malevolent 
 feeling, but that it is correlative with all exces- 
 sive emotion whatever, as is implied in the 
 simple admission that any emotion may go 
 to excess. So that up to a certain point 
 malevolent emotion may be as pleasurable 
 as any other. So clear is this that I even hesitate 
 to say that that person is fortunate, if such a one 
 exists, who has never known a malignant joy of 
 any kind — that is, any joy connected with any one 
 else's pain or discomfiture — for to be wholly de- 
 void of the capacity for such joy would seem to 
 imply, in the present stage of human evolution, 
 some want of sensibility. True, the test of pre- 
 dominant goodness in character is just the degree 
 of rapidity and certainty with which one passes 
 from a malignant satisfaction to pity or a compre- 
 hensive sadness over all manifestations of evil ; 
 but that is another matter. It is still part of the 
 paradox of our being that the destructive feeling 
 is at times momentarily inevitable to the process 
 of moral judgment. 
 
86 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 Some will doubtless object to the term male- 
 volence or malignity as applied to what is called 
 a just indignation, as if anybody could possibly be 
 indignant without feeling that he was justly so. 
 The terms ** noble rage '' and ** righteous wrath '* 
 testify to the conviction that at times we do well 
 to be angry. But it is mere confusion to apply 
 the terms malignant and malevolent only to angry 
 feelings which we believe to be wrong or unwar- 
 ranted, and to separate the notion from all anger 
 which we believe to be justified. Let us clear our 
 minds of cant. When we call our neighbour 
 malignant, he, or she — it is frequently she — is 
 satisfied of the justice of the feeling we condemn, 
 else the anger would not be there ; and when we 
 ourselves are indignant with the best cause in the 
 world we may easily be ** malevolent ** in the eyes 
 of another neighbour. And even when we and 
 our neighbours combine to detest somebody with 
 no friends, be it the Whitechapel murderer or the 
 man who blasphemes our Gods, an enemy of 
 society or a reformer of it — and it is sometimes 
 hard to say which is the more hated — in either 
 case we are exemplifying that elemental destruc- 
 tive force which, paired in unconscious Nature 
 with its opposite, as repulsion with attraction, is 
 seen in conscious Nature in the wars of beasts and 
 of races, modifying and refining up through invec- 
 tive and competition to the subtleties of epigrams 
 and barbed compliments, and the moral exultation 
 good people feel over the downfall of evil doers. 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 87 
 
 It IS one of the drawbacks of an undiversified 
 study of ethics — for every single study has its 
 drawbacks — that it tends to carry us out of sight 
 of our cosmical significance and relations ; and it 
 is well at times to go back to the premiss that we 
 are all evolved out of the cosmic gas, and to con- 
 template ourselves dispassionately as mere ** fruits 
 of the unknown daedalian plan '' equally with the 
 birds and the landscape. There is no fear of our 
 being morally the worse : we can never be the 
 worse for knowing ourselves better. 
 
 Now, there can be no question that a good 
 deal of our pleasure in life comes of this pervasive 
 unkind feeling towards others. Some of us may 
 have it only in the primordial and comparatively 
 innocent form of the consciousness that we are 
 better than many of our neighbours. But it can 
 take more active forms than that without making 
 us notoriously unpopular. To some avocations it 
 is a sine qua non. Not to speak of politics, or 
 social purity propaganda, or popular preaching, 
 it is clearly one of the conditions of literary criti- 
 cism ; for if we did not dislike inferior books and 
 resent the waste of our time over them we should 
 have no enthusiasm for the books that repay our 
 reading. And it may be contended that there are 
 few purer forms of malignant pleasure than that 
 which comes of being critically severe on a bad 
 writer without experiencing or showing that bad 
 temper which we all admit to be a form of dis- 
 comfort. An English critic, writing of a passage 
 
88 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 in which Sainte-Beuve makes pitiless fun over an 
 imitator of Chateaubriand, remarks, ** I think 
 Sainte-Beuve must have enjoyed himself very 
 much in writing- this, for it is extremely clever, 
 and profoundly ill-natured.'* And all of Sainte- 
 Beuve's tribe, down to the smallest, will admit 
 the probability ; though they may demur to the 
 phrase " profoundly ill-natured *', as applied to a 
 case of malevolence where the pleasure lies much 
 more in the wit itself than in the sting it may in- 
 flict on another. All humor, we may safely say, 
 is safeguarding in its general effects, and at least 
 precludes more injurious emotion on the part of 
 the humorist, even if the person laughed at does 
 not join, as he sometimes can, in the laugh against 
 himself. We know, indeed, that humor itself 
 takes its rise, or that one of the elements of 
 humor does, in the pleasurable excitement of the 
 lower grades of humanity over the spectacle of 
 suffering. Savages, we know, exhibit enjoyment 
 in witnessing the struggles of a drow^ning man 
 who has done them no harm ; and even among 
 such a comparatively civilised populace as the 
 Chinese, it is said, people will laugh at the sight 
 of a slipping ladder with men upon it. Among 
 ourselves, the frequently confessed sense of 
 amusement at the spectacle of a man falling on 
 ice is a modified survival of the same organic ten- 
 dency, which should qualify our impulse to express 
 horror at the brutalities of ancient Pagans. But 
 while the sense of the incongruous, so valuable 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 89 
 
 as a palliative to stress of serious feeling, is thus 
 developed, like everything else, out of very ugly 
 beginnings, it is finally on the side rather of social 
 than of anti-social sentiment. 
 
 Lest, however, we obscure the question by only 
 thinking of non-serious malignity, let us turn to 
 the case of that pleasurable exaltation which is so 
 often seen to accompany angry feeling on the part 
 of serious persons towards those whose wicked- 
 ness they denounce or expose. And let us make 
 the point clearer by taking a particular case. In 
 a recently published biographical sketch of a lady 
 now living, it was told how she brought to public 
 disgrace a young officer who had sought to 
 seduce a young servant girl. The lady, learning 
 of the facts, instructed the girl to make an assign- 
 ation with the young man in a public place, and to 
 this place at the appointed time she brought or 
 sent a number of young artisans who, having been 
 informed of the nature of the case, assaulted, mal- 
 treated, and publicly derided the offender, who 
 finally had to slink away in an ignominious 
 fashion. And we are told that if the lady who 
 arranged the episode had been able, she would 
 have had the officer cashiered. The whole story, 
 I understand, has given much moral satisfaction 
 to the majority of those who are active on behalf of 
 •social purity. They feel that the vicious and heart- 
 less purpose of the offender was rightly punished, 
 and that it would have been well if he could have 
 been cashiered, and reduced to the lowest ignominy. 
 
90 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 Here there can be no question either of the 
 warmly malevolent feeling or of the pleasure ac- 
 companying it, or of the association of that 
 pleasure with strong and serious moral convic- 
 tions. The persons applauding will of course call 
 their feeling righteous ; they may even call it 
 divine. Lord Wolseley has written that there 
 must surely be some spark of divine fire in the 
 exultation of the warrior when he comes to grips 
 with his foe. It certainly seems a pity that a word 
 should be reduced to having no function whatever; 
 and I at least should make no demur to Lord 
 Wolseley 's proposition if there were added to it 
 this corollary : That there is also a spark of 
 divine fire in the feeling with which some of us, 
 on reading that and similar utterances of Lord 
 Wolseley, privately apply to him opprobrious 
 terms, of which, for public purposes, we modify 
 the forms, but hardly the spirit. Seeing, how- 
 ever, that this impartial employment of the term 
 *' divine *' might lead to confusion, it seems bet- 
 ter to argue without it. I would call Lord Wolse- 
 ley 's divine fire simply a particular manifestation 
 of malevolent feeling, as I would call the episode 
 of the lady and the disgraced officer such a mani- 
 festation. And now we come to our moral pro- 
 blem : How are these manifestations of feeling to- 
 be viewed from the standpoint of ethical science? 
 
 We are agreed, I hope, that, as feeling is 
 evolved out of the unconscious, so moral feeling^ 
 is evolved out of the simply conscious ; and that: 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 91 
 
 thus our benevolent and our malevolent feelings 
 alike are fitly to be subjected to the checks of 
 reason, the test of results, just as the processes of 
 nature and the tendencies of the lower animals are 
 held to be fitly subjected to our control. Instinct, 
 first-thoug-ht, is valid, ethically speaking, only 
 when it has been endorsed by correlative instincts, 
 by second and third thoughts ; and it is in the 
 nature of moral evolution that the further or quali- 
 fying instincts tend to be developed successively 
 and continuously. The perpetual diflficulty of 
 practical ethics is this — that while morality clearly 
 rests equally on primary self-regarding instinct 
 and on secondary sympathetic instinct, both in- 
 stincts alike are capable of leading to evil. The 
 very sense of right rises in physical instinct, as 
 we can see in the habits of animals ; and this is 
 the scientific justification of the term '* natural 
 right ", which covers all social arrangements that 
 can be permanently harmonised with the first bio- 
 logical instinct and its social correlative, and 
 marks off as invalid and deserving of abolition all 
 other so-called rights set up by the legislation of 
 either the majority or the minority. Now, it is in 
 the nature of a relatively high or developed moral 
 enthusiasm, just as of a relatively low or primary 
 egoism, to outleap the check of the secondary in- 
 stinct of sympathy, or of the further sympathy 
 which checks the first. Indignation, in the nature 
 of the case, excludes sympathy with its object ; 
 which is another way of saying that indignation 
 
92 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 is at all times morally dangerous. In the case 
 we are specially considering, of the conscientious 
 lady, burning to humiliate the vicious officer, the 
 indignation springs first from sympathy with the 
 endangered girl ; but there is clearly no scintilla 
 of sympathy with the wrongdoer. And yet the 
 wrongdoer should be taken into account. Either 
 he is to remain a member of society or he is not. 
 In the latter case we must either shut him up for 
 ever or put him to death ; and the propriety of 
 either of these courses, if it is anyone's instinct to 
 take either, is determined by its social results. 
 But probably not even the indignant lady in the 
 height of her wrath thought of putting the sinner 
 to death, or in even temporary custody. Now, if 
 neither of these courses is to be taken, if he is to 
 remain a member of society, our action towards 
 him is clearly non-moral if we put him outside all 
 sympathy. To leave a man free and yet treat 
 him as a noxious lower animal is to cancel morality 
 in his case, to tell him that you in no way recog- 
 nise any human claims of his to goodwill, which 
 amounts to saying that he need now recognise no 
 claims of yours — that is to say, as between you 
 and him there is no morality. And if this situa- 
 tion can rightly arise over a grave offence, short 
 of penal treatment, it may rightly arise over a 
 small one which we chance to resent warmly. 
 
 Instead of putting the matter thus abstractly, 
 let us, for clearness sake, put it concretely. What 
 are the practical effects of publicly and grossly 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity, 93 
 
 humiliating a wrongdoer? Is he made better or 
 worse? No open-minded inquirer will deny that 
 there is a great probability of his being made 
 worse, of his being driven, for one thing, into a 
 state of permanent and abiding hatred towards 
 all who have humiliated him, and of a further 
 determination to be merely more furtive and not 
 more scrupulous in his actions. If you disgrace 
 him to the extent of driving him out of all decent 
 society, you virtually tell him to join the " lapsed 
 mass ", so called, and conform wholly to its stan- 
 dards. In the particular case under notice, all 
 this might have happened, and worse. Suppos- 
 ing the vicious young officer had been, as some 
 vicious young officers are, physically powerful and 
 courageous, and had furiously resisted his assail- 
 ants, there might have been bloodshed and mui^- 
 der, the real guilt of which would lie at the door 
 of that moral strategist, the indignant lady. I 
 will not suggest that there might very easily have 
 arisen a painful mistake in identification, 
 for that argument would apply equally to 
 all cases of punitive action, physical or 
 other, in which a culprit was to be pub- 
 licly exposed. I will assume that the 
 possibility of mistake was excluded ; and will 
 suppose finally the case of the officer being 
 cashiered. To get out of the army is, in most 
 cases, a good thing ; to be drummed out of it 
 is to be invited in the name of society to turn card- 
 sharper or loafer, or to get away into a totally 
 
94 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 new society, for which, in the terms of the case, 
 you are no less unfit than you are for that from 
 which you are expelled. 
 
 Now, that is exactly the penal method of the 
 Middle Ages in minor cases. In our own day 
 we at times meet survivals of it in the resort of 
 provincial magistrates to the device of telling a 
 suspicious person to leave the town and go to 
 some other town. They are simply throwing 
 their refuse into their neighbours' garden, a pro- 
 ceeding which, on the part of an individual citi- 
 zen, leads to his being fined and menaced ; but 
 which, on the part of a magistrate getting rid of 
 a bad citizen, has its unscrupulousness veiled for 
 the eye of his fellow-citizens by their limitation of 
 their ethics to their own municipal boundary. But 
 let us not single out the primitive provincial 
 magistrate for our censure. Broadly speaking, 
 we all live morally from hand to mouth. Just as 
 the cleanest of us continue to allow our sewage 
 to pollute the river and the sea-beach, so do the 
 most scrupulously moral among us as a rule 
 merely elbow immorality away from us and on to 
 some one else's ground. The lying or thieving 
 apprentice or servant who plagues and plunders 
 us we get rid of ; '' some one else can try her '*; 
 and when we rise to the height of refusing her a 
 ** character '' we feel we have touched the very 
 summits of virtue, since we do nothing to deceive 
 our neighbour, that is, our servant-employing 
 neighbour. We have only left our other 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 95 
 
 neighbour, the offender, to take to prostitution, if 
 she hkes, for a living. 
 
 At times, indeed, such a policy of expulsion may 
 be in a manner forced upon an individual placed 
 in a position of responsible administration. Thus 
 Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, was noted for the prompti- 
 tude in which he expelled from his school those 
 whom he counted unpromising boys ; and he 
 made his policy a matter of principle. ** Till a 
 man learn,'' he declared, ** that the first, second, 
 and third duty of a schoolmaster is to get rid of 
 unpromising subjects, a great public school will 
 never be what it might be, and what it ought to 
 be.*'^ In this course he had, it seems, a theory 
 of final utility, sometimes retaining boys guilty of 
 grave offences, and expelling others whose 
 offences were comparatively venial, being ** de- 
 cided by the ultimate result on the whole character 
 of the individual, or on the general state of the 
 school." Rugby being a public boarding-school, 
 it might be contended that boys thus expelled 
 were not necessarily made Ishmaelites, but, 
 whether good or bad, might get their schooling 
 otherwise. Arnold described one boy as '* just 
 one of those characters which cannot bear a public 
 school, and may be saved and turned to great 
 good by the humanities of private tuition ''. But 
 it is obvious that in a public system of education, 
 power of expulsion of this kind from public 
 
 * Stanley's * Life of Arnold ', ch. iii. 
 
96 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 schools entails a public responsibility of providing 
 other schools where troublesome subjects may be 
 dealt with ; whereas Arnold evidently thought 
 much more of the task of keeping his own school 
 right from his own point of view, than of the 
 chances left open to the boys he expelled ; and 
 many people are seen to acquiesce in the expulsion 
 of poor but naughty boys from the pubhc day 
 schools, without asking whether it is right that 
 these black sheep should be thrust masterless into 
 the outer darkness, and left to develop their bad 
 tendencies as they list. To do this is simply to 
 facilitate and manufacture crime, the limitation of 
 which is one of the foremost purposes of national 
 education. And if in all these cases there is 
 grave cause for circumspection, surely there is 
 equal cause in cases in which good people propose 
 to resort to a policy of moral boycotting of certain 
 classes of offenders. As a means of enforcing a 
 particular act of social submission, boycotting may 
 be ethically defensible in certain circumstances ; 
 but as a means of permanently extracting indi- 
 viduals for whom we make no social provision, it 
 is scientifically inconsequent and socially barbar- 
 ous. It is trying to treat the sinner as the 
 Middle Ages treated the leper ; a sinking of the 
 relations of human beings at the point in question 
 to those of gregarious animals whose first instincts 
 constitute their whole morality. 
 
 What has all this to do, it may be asked, with 
 the Pleasures of Malignity ? This much, that hos- 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 97 
 
 tile feeling, as we set out by saying, may as easily 
 work evil when formally sanctioned by our 
 morality as when not so sanctioned. Somehow 
 sanctioned it always is : we cannot possibly be 
 angry or resentful without feeling we have some 
 cause ; but we do not always pat ourselves on the 
 back and say our wrath is righteous and morally 
 ordained. Carlyle announced to himself and 
 others that his rage was Godlike when it was 
 turned against a set of wretched criminals ; but, 
 though he always inclined more or less to consider 
 his wrath divinely inspired, he was not wont to 
 announce with equal confidence the sacredness of 
 his fury at a maid-of-all-work who banged the 
 plates on the table. I am trying to show you that 
 all forms of wrath are equally in need of super- 
 vision, and that formulas like Carlyle's are at 
 bottom either cant or self-delusion. 
 
 But now arises the further question : Are the 
 pleasures of malignity ever pardonable or tolerable 
 from the point of view of ethical science? To 
 some of you I may seem to be proving too much, 
 to be laying down principles which cannot be ap- 
 plied to human life. Well, I will not ride off on 
 the subterfuge that ideals are at least always use- 
 ful as standards to try other people's conduct by : 
 I will face the difficulty of application to practice. 
 Our guiding principle, we have seen, is that of 
 final utility, or rather the general ethical test 
 which is compounded out of the instincts of self- 
 preservation, of sympathy, and of final social 
 
 1 
 
98 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 utility. Now, I maintain that by that general 
 test the episode of the public humiliation of the 
 vicious young- officer is condemned as in itself a 
 non-moral proceeding*. It was the worst of 
 all practicable ways of dealing with the case ; just 
 as, if the warm-tempered lady herself had been 
 guilty, in the heat of moral indignation, of speak- 
 ing unjustly and calumniously — as well-meaning 
 people sometimes will speak — of some person 
 whose principles she disliked, the worst possible 
 way of dealing with her error would have been to 
 confront her at a public meeting convened for 
 moral purposes and accuse her of falsehood and 
 slander. And this consideration brings me, who 
 am a journalist and lecturer, to the question, Is 
 any kind or degree of public exposure, in the form 
 of printed invective or sarcasm, ever ethically jus- 
 tifiable? 
 
 Here we soon come to a practicable stand. I 
 may be compounding, in the proverbial fashion, 
 for the sins I am inclined to, but I should 
 say that moral or literary exposure of certain 
 kinds of wrong-doing, assuming it to be made in 
 a social spirit, is part of the inevitable strife of 
 progress, since there are kinds of wrong-doing 
 which cannot well be resisted or modified in any 
 other way. Suppose, for instance, a bishop makes 
 an unscrupulous and calumnious attack on the 
 principles of so-called Materialists and Ration- 
 alists, as bishops do every now and then, it is 
 hardly conceivable that any Materialist can do any 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 99 
 
 good by private remonstrance. You may pri- 
 vately moralise a vicious young- officer by expostu- 
 lation ; but hardly an elderly bishop. And even 
 if you could, your private success would not undo 
 the public evil done, unless the bishop were in- 
 duced to retract publicly his injurious utterance ; 
 which act, on the part of a bishop, I take to be 
 inconceivable. In the interests of the right cul- 
 ture of the public, therefore, from the Rationalist's 
 point of view, the bishop ought to be attacked and 
 refuted ; and if sarcasm be useful as a means of 
 bringing the bishop's folly and injustice home to 
 those whom he may have swayed for evil, the use 
 of such sarcasm — unless it can be shown to work 
 social evil by driving the bishop to desperation, 
 which is hardly likely — is in the present stage of 
 civilisation ethically justifiable. In which case the 
 operating- Rationalist is likely to enjoy one of the 
 Pleasures of Malignity, for it is hardly in human 
 nature not to enjoy satirising a pretentious and 
 bullying bishop. Here we are publicly exposing-, 
 in a limited and therefore on the whole a defensible 
 manner, a public man, who by public speech as- 
 sumed public responsibility, and w^ho would pro- 
 bably admit in the abstract that public criticism is 
 a proper check on public men, whatever he might 
 think of any particular criticism of himself. Here 
 there is no driving of a private person into the 
 glare of public disgrace, and thence into the gloom 
 of private degeneration, which leads to lower and 
 lower vice and crime. We are applying moral 
 
100 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 punishment in the one rational way, that is to say, 
 to the substantially g-ood rather than to the sub- 
 stantially bad — a paradox which I recommend to 
 your serious attention. We enforce oft the offen- 
 der the lesson either of self-regarding prudence or 
 of wholesome criticism. We either deter or en- 
 lighten him for the future. All practical ethical 
 tests are satisfied, except perhaps that involved 
 in the question whether the exposure of the bishop 
 may not have an injurious effect on the character 
 of the person who exposes him. And this is a 
 difficult question, opening up new difficulties. We 
 have to settle whether, or how far, the Pleasures 
 of Malignity are subjectively demoralising. 
 
 Clearly there is a risk, to begin with, of growing 
 to take a vicious or undue pleasure in the ex- 
 posure of human frailties. Once, as an anony- 
 mous journalist, I penned a paragraph of sarcastic 
 criticism of a philanthropic religious lady who, 
 professing to speak in the name of a religion of 
 love, chanced to display a rather startling access 
 of what seemed gratuitously malevolent feeling. 
 On this another religious and philanthropic lady 
 wrote me an indignant letter, accusing me of tak- 
 ing pleasure in publishing good people's errors. 
 In that case I suppose there was an indulgence in 
 the Pleasures of Malignity all round ; and it would 
 be fatuous on my part to contend that two good 
 women were wholly wrong and I wholly right. 
 The ethical tests would be : Was the first lady 
 advantageously and necessarily admonished ; 
 
The Pleasures oj Maligniiy. 101 
 
 were many ladies as much put out as the second 
 lady ; and was my character vitiated. I will not 
 here attempt to answer any of these questions : I 
 only indicate them. But I will say in general 
 terms that any position is unfortunate in which 
 man or woman is led to indulge more in male- 
 volent feeling, no matter against whom, than in 
 pity and tolerance and philosophic recognition of 
 the immanence of evil in things. Whether our 
 bias be naturally to such an excess of indulgence 
 in the Pleasures of Malignity, or whether such a 
 bias be developed by our surroundings and avoca- 
 tion, the evil is the same. We tend to be multi- 
 pliers rather than repressors of evil ; and multi- 
 plication of evil of any kind whatever is ethically 
 indefensible. This caveat clearly applies to all 
 who are concerned in public controversy, to poli- 
 ticians, to partisan journalists, to advocates of 
 social purity, to religionists, to freethinkers. And, 
 by way of bringing home the moral, I would say 
 that it is one of the risks of Freethinkers in par- 
 ticular that whereas they find themselves often 
 assailed, if they be at all outspoken, with what 
 they feel to be base or mean injustice and odious 
 virulence by religious bigots and others, they are 
 tempted to a constant preparation for asperity, a 
 more and more frequent satisfaction in wounding 
 attack and rejoinder and pitiless ridicule — a too 
 great indulgence, in fact, in the Pleasures of 
 Malignity, making them less humane and there- 
 fore less social than they might conceivably have 
 
102 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 been. They harden themselves, perhaps, against 
 attack, and so escape some pain on their own ac- 
 count, but they tend at this point to multiply ill- 
 feeling rather than good. 
 
 On the other hand, however, it seems to be im- 
 plied in the spirit of utilitarian ethics that a cer- 
 tain exercise of the Pleasures of Malignity may 
 subjectively as well as objectively coincide with 
 social progress ; since if it be necessary sometimes 
 to inflict moral or literary punishment it must be 
 beneficial to cultivate to a certain extent the faculty 
 for the practice. And this raises the question how far 
 the public and purposive indulgence in the Pleasures 
 of Malignity may be subjectively beneficial. 
 
 One of the outstanding features in European 
 ethical practice, from the dark ages down to last 
 century, was the apparently universal feeling that 
 it was a good discipline and a praiseworthy exer- 
 cise for an independent gentleman to ** go to the 
 wars '*, wherever the wars might happen to be. 
 Nothing could ostensibly be more un-Christian, 
 in one of the commoner senses of the term ; but 
 neither clergy nor moralists seem ever to have 
 condemned it. The official theory doubtless was 
 that war might arise anywhere at any time, and 
 that preparation was to be made in every avail- 
 able way ; but there was also the assumption that 
 the discipline itself was good, as forming charac- 
 ter ; and down to our own day, for instance in the 
 writings of Mr. Ruskin, there has been abundant 
 eulogy of the type of character evolved by war. 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 103 
 
 To these mostly rhapsodic dicta we can, of course, 
 
 as students of ethics, pay no deference. They one 
 
 and all, like Wordsworth's ' Character of the 
 
 Happy Warrior ', magnify the results of war in 
 
 developing the pre-eminent warrior, and make 
 
 little account of the general human significance of 
 
 the fact that he is 
 
 " doomed to go in company with Pain 
 And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ;" 
 
 and, sooth to say, the poetic picture drawn of the 
 warrior is usually far wide of the truth. On that 
 point we need not stay : the responsibility for the 
 soldier lies with us who employ him, and there an 
 end. Soldiering is to be made an end of, as an 
 anachronism, as soon as may be : the question is 
 whether moral conflict, with its bloodless but still 
 malevolent strife, can yield the ideal discipline held 
 to be attained in war, while working not only no 
 objective but no subjective evil. In one aspect, the 
 discipline of war would seem to have a certain ad- 
 vantage. The ideal warrior has been in all civi- 
 lised times one who passed rapidly from the fury 
 of battle to the calm of courteous intercourse. 
 He must not exult grossly over a dead foe : that 
 was felt even in the Homeric age to be impious ; 
 and Mr. Swinburne, calling the French Emperor 
 ** dog '' after as he did before his death, falls 
 below the classic standard.* The warrior must 
 
 * The Emperor, odious as he truly was, did not quite 
 miss his mark when he laid down Hugo's Chdtimenis with 
 the one word Ignoble, 
 
104 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 bear no continuous hatred. But how often and 
 how far has the ideal been reahsed ? Let the story 
 of our own great Civil War suffice for answer. 
 If the malignities of political and other controversy 
 be sometimes enduring and ignoble, so assuredly 
 have been those of race feuds and faction hatreds 
 which were waged with physical weapons ; and if 
 great commanders and brave soldiers could be 
 placable and mutually respecting, so have been 
 and so may be the leaders and the combatants in 
 the wars of thought and of social predilection. 
 Professor Bain, in his sketch of John Mill, gives us 
 a short prose picture which will compare very well, 
 ethically speaking, with Wordsworth's poetry : — 
 
 " There is great difficulty in arriving at the precise de- 
 gree of the fundamental or elementary emotions in almost 
 any mind, still more in Mill, who, by training or culture, 
 was a highly complex product. The remark is applicable 
 to the tender feeling viewed in its ultimate form ; and 
 even more to the other great source of human emotion — 
 the Malevolent or irascible feeling. Unless conspicuously 
 present, or conspicuously absent, the amount of feeling 
 in the elementary shape can with difficulty be estimated in 
 a character notable for growth, and for complication of im- 
 pulses. In Mill, all the coarse, crude forms of angry pas- 
 sion were entirely wanting. He never got into a rage. 
 His pleasures of malevolence, so far as existing, were of a 
 very refined nature. Only in the punishment of offenders 
 against his fellow-men, did he indulge revengeful senti- 
 ment. He could, on occasions, be very severe in his judg- 
 ments and denunciations ; but vulgar calumny, abuse, 
 hatred for the mere sake of hatred, were completely cruci- 
 fied in him. He spent a large part of his life in polemics ; 
 and his treatment of opponents was a model of the ethics 
 of controversy. The delight in victory was with him a 
 genial, hearty chuckle, and no more." * 
 
 *'J. S. Mill,' p. 151. 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 105 
 
 Here then we have, in a very different sense 
 from the original purport of Johnson's phrase, "a 
 good hater '' ; one who can be both stern and 
 placable ; a vigorous foe and a well-wishing fel- 
 low citizen ; one who seems never to have wor- 
 sened in character for all his controversies. 
 Pleasures of Malevolence he certainly had ; but 
 they never came near over-balancing his benevo- 
 lent affections ; any more than the passionate re- 
 sentments of Shelley ever encroached on the wide 
 range of his intense philanthropy. And this, I 
 take it, must be the ideal for the age of intellec- 
 tual and moral conflict, just as the temperate war- 
 rior, formidable in fight but soon serene in peace, 
 was the ideal of ages in which men could not 
 see beyond the necessity of war. Certainly we 
 cannot at present see beyond the necessity of 
 social antagonism ; and though an utter dis- 
 appearance of all Pleasures of Malignity be the 
 ideal goal of moral evolution, it is quite certain 
 that it is biologically impossible for even an appre- 
 ciable minority of civilised men at present. It be- 
 longs theoretically to the Stage of Equilibrium, 
 which is yet inconceivably remote. And thus the 
 doctrine of non-resistance, instructive as pointing 
 to a remote ideal, must be recognised as a bio- 
 logical impossibility for even an appreciable 
 minority. 
 
 Its one modern propounder, Count Tolstoy, is 
 to be understood only as having come to 
 it in a certain physiological state, towards the 
 
106 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 end of a long- life well filled with the Pleasures of 
 Malig-nity. There is in him, as his countryman 
 Stepniak has recently well pointed out, something 
 of the Oriental ; and it is in the Oriental that we 
 find, contrasted with some of the extremest phases 
 of indulgences in the Pleasures of Malignity, the 
 nearest approach to the entire disappearance of 
 them. The one extreme may conceivably follow 
 the other in the same organism. And this suggests 
 the need of remembering how the two swings of 
 the pendulum are equally normal phases of the 
 average moralised man. Most of the legendary 
 or historical figures presented to us exhibit both ; 
 and there is clearly nothing to be gained for ethics 
 by the common practice of representing the Jesus 
 of the Gospels as incapable of the Pleasures of 
 Malevolence, when, as there pictured, he had 
 them rather frequently ; or by the other practice 
 of conceiving Paul in terms of his eloquent eulogy 
 of love, and ignoring his only too frequent indul- 
 gence in the opposite emotion. The result of 
 these false generalisations is that the plainest in- 
 dulgences in malevolent feeling in any ethical or 
 religious connection are no longer recognised by 
 the religionists who commit them as malignities at 
 all ; and we have the spectacle of bitter and de- 
 moralising malevolence predominating in the 
 minds of would-be reformers, who tell themselves 
 that no amount of such passion on their part can 
 be injurious, since, like that of their religious ex- 
 emplars, it is always directed against evil. I want 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity, 107 
 
 you to remember that the passion itself partakes 
 of the nature of evil, and is vindicated only when 
 a clear balance of objective and subjective good 
 can be shown to issue. 
 
 And those who need the warning, remember, 
 are not merely public teachers and combatants but 
 private persons ; and not merely men but women; 
 for it is very certain that while women have been 
 historically non-combatants in civilised war, they 
 are to the full as susceptible as men of the moral 
 Pleasures of Malignity. They even exhibit some 
 developments of malevolence from which the dis- 
 cipline of public strife tends to preserve men ; and 
 since that discipline in the case of women is still 
 but slightly available, there is the more need in 
 their case for watchfulness. Especially do they 
 tend, by reason of their special moral development 
 in one or two directions, to excess of moral male- 
 volence in connection with those points in con- 
 duct. Now, for individuals as for parties, there 
 is this safe general test, that a chronic predomi- 
 nance or prolonged violence of malevolent feeling, 
 whether it be called moral or political, or partisan 
 or religious, means multiplication of evil ; and 
 that the party or the person most frequently in- 
 dulging in the Pleasures of Malignity, especially 
 in the serious as distinct from the humorous form, 
 is most likely to be working harm. Try by that 
 test both parties and their leaders, and you will 
 seldom go far wrong. Ask of a politician : does 
 he oftener speak generously, sympathetically, hu- 
 
108 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 manely, constructively, or bitterly, malignantly^ 
 harshly, destructively, and you have at least one 
 trustworthy test of his work, if only you do not 
 make the blunder of supposing that the supersed- 
 ing of worn-out beliefs and institutions by better 
 ones is finally a process of destruction. 
 
 And, finally, as regards individual conduct, it 
 is above all things important to realise that what 
 most of us who concern ourselves about ethics 
 have most to guard against is just excess of male- 
 volence towards those whom we most confidently 
 reckon evil-doers. The truth may be best put in 
 the form of our paradox that punishment is for 
 the good rather than for the bad. The man in 
 whom moral tendencies predominate may be in- 
 fluenced for good by your censure or your satire ; 
 the man in whom immoral tendencies predominate 
 will not be so influenced. To adopt, then, a course 
 of invective and of humiliating exposure tending 
 to make him wholly reprobate, is only to multiply 
 evil in the name of good, a course plainly inex- 
 cusable in us who all admit that we at times fall 
 into evil ; since the principle of punishment 
 to the uttermost may as fitly begin at a 
 smaller sin as at a greater, among those 
 who are to remain fellow-citizens, and whO' 
 do not propose to destroy or imprison each 
 Other. It is the greater sinner who most 
 claims our consideration, and the more commonly 
 reprobated an offence is, the more cause is there 
 for scrupulous people to beware of driving ar^ 
 
The Pleasures of Malignity. 109 
 
 offender to worse courses. This is the principle 
 that condemns the greater part of our official penal 
 machinery — condemns it so decisively, that there 
 are few offences against the law which a good and 
 circumspect citizen will not wish or seek to screen 
 and try to deal with privately rather than hand 
 them over for public prosecution. Much more 
 readily will he allow himself to arraign publicly — 
 not private error, which even in private he should 
 be quick to forgive, but the public wrong-doing, 
 moral or intellectual, of the well-placed and the 
 complacent, who are countenanced and not dis- 
 countenanced by convention in their injustice or 
 their unscrupulousness, because they are substan- 
 tially and in intention on the side of morality. 
 These he is not likely to dislike with too pro- 
 longed heat, since the sight of what is good in 
 them can comparatively easily recall him to the 
 philosophic recognition of universal frailty, which 
 is so much commoner a frame of mind than the 
 philosophic recognition of the cosmic nature of 
 evil, and than pity for those who are the vessels 
 of it. So will he enjoy his Pleasures of Malignity 
 in the form least productive of evil and most pro- 
 ductive of good ; and so will he cultivate in his 
 own person the best of those characteristics which 
 we associate with the word chivalry and with the 
 word generosity. That, we all admit, is not the 
 ultimate ideal, but it is a tolerable working ideal 
 for these days of social and intellectual strife. 
 The Golden Age lies for ever beyond. 
 
INTERNATIONAL ETHICS. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 (1897.) 
 
 As it Is impossible to study individual ethics to any 
 purpose save v^ith an eye to the actual cases of 
 every-day life, so it is impossible to discuss inter- 
 national ethics to any purpose save with an eye 
 to actual international issues. To do this, how- 
 ever, involves meddling- with matters of current 
 politics, matters which to some extent involve 
 party sympathies, if not party interests, and which 
 it is not easy to discuss without sometimes giving 
 personal offence where feelings have been warmly 
 engaged : a drawback the more serious because 
 such irritation tends to frustrate the main purpose 
 of the inquiry. On the other hand, the very fact 
 that feelings are so warmly engaged in these 
 issues is in itself a reason for the entrance of the 
 critical spirit, that so haply we may reach prin- 
 ciples of action which will stand the same from one 
 day to another, and so give us some such stability 
 of code in international as we have in the majority 
 of social relations. We can best, then, show the 
 purity of our sympathies, whichever way they go, 
 by consenting to apply to them, in the name of 
 ethics, just such tests of comparison as we make 
 in problems of justice and duty between man and 
 man. If our concern is right action, we are bound 
 to put aside our personal susceptibilities to the 
 ( "o ) 
 
International Ethics, 111 
 
 extent of fairly facing all the relevant facts. And 
 if I do not satisfy you of the impartiality of my 
 inquiry, at least my attempt may help some who 
 listen to carry it on to better purpose on their own 
 account. 
 
 We have to consider a problem which is not at 
 the moment so disturbing- as it was a few months 
 ago, having- been in a manner allowed to pass 
 aside ;^ but which was rather evaded, on grounds 
 of expediency, than thought out in terms of moral 
 science, and so may recur any day, in a more 
 dangerously disturbing form than before. I refer, 
 of course, to the problem raised by the demand 
 among us for armed interference on the part of 
 this country in the interests of the harried and 
 decimated Christians of Armenia. A large body 
 of our serious citizens — people not usually associ- 
 ated with display of the war spirit — were avowedly 
 prepared to go to war in that quarrel ; protesting, 
 of course, their earnest desire to see it settled 
 without bloodshed ; but avowing that if blood- 
 shed must come in the attempt, it were better than 
 impotent acceptance of continued wrong. Such a 
 serious proposal, coming from conscientious 
 people, calls for a more thorough scrutiny in the 
 name of ethics than it has yet received in the name 
 of politics. And first we must look at it in the 
 open daylight of general history, in its true per- 
 spective. 
 
 *This was spoken before the outbreak in Crete, which 
 led to the Graeco-Turkish war. 
 
112 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 It is a little over forty years since one of the 
 great English poets of the century gave his coun- 
 sel to his countrymen on a burning question of in- 
 ternational politics, in a poem which is perhaps 
 the most lyrically inspired of all his works. The 
 counsel was to the effect that a great war, not of 
 self-defence but of punishment, was an admirable 
 and beneficent expression of a nation's spirit, every 
 way preferable to a state of peace flawed by indus- 
 trial misery and commercial deceit. On this 
 theme the poet's song reaches its most fervent 
 rhythms : 
 
 " And as months rolled on, and rumor of battle grew, 
 * It is time, it is time, O passionate heart,' said I 
 (For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and true), 
 ' It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye, 
 That old, hysterical, mock disease should die.' 
 And I stood on a giant deck, and mix'd my breath 
 With a loyal people, shouting a battle-cry, 
 Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly 
 Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death. 
 Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims 
 Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold. 
 And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, 
 Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told ; 
 And hail once more to the banner of battle unroU'd ! 
 Tho' many a light shall darken and many shall weep 
 For those that are crush'd in the clash of jarring claims, 
 Yet God's just doom shall be wreak'd on a giant liar ; 
 And many a darkness into the light shall leap, 
 And shine in the sudden making of splendid names. 
 And noble thought be freer under the sun, 
 And the heart of a people beat with one desire ; 
 For the long, long canker of peace is over and done. 
 And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep, 
 And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames 
 The blood-red blossom of war, with a heeirt of fire." 
 
International Ethics. 113 
 
 That was how Tennyson, in 1854, glorified the 
 Crimean war, just begun, and vituperated Russia, 
 the adversary. In later editions of ' Maud \ he 
 modified a few words. '' God's just doom " be- 
 came '' God's just wrath '', when it was found 
 that the *' doom '' did not come to pass ; and 
 ** The long, long canker of peace '' became *' the 
 peace that I deemed no peace " ; but there was 
 added this strophe, affirming the general doc- 
 trine : 
 
 " Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind ; 
 We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble 
 
 still. 
 And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind ; 
 It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill ; 
 I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind. 
 I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd." 
 
 It is well to recall the merits of the quarrel thus 
 sung. We have been told of late that these old 
 stories should not be raked up. Old stories 
 should never be raked up where the raking up will 
 do nothing but rekindle malice ; but where the 
 objects in view are knowledge and wisdom, and 
 the prevention of future malice, we cannot too 
 fully consider the facts. And in this case we shall 
 not find ourselves tempted to blame anybody more 
 than ourselves on our own side. The Crimean 
 war, then, was undertaken by this country in re- 
 sentment of the claims of the Russian Govern- 
 ment to champion the Greek Christian Church 
 against the Latin at Jerusalem, and to create a 
 protectorate over the Greek Christians in Turkey. 
 
114 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 That is to say, the quarrel on the Russian side was 
 nominally religious ; and the entire war may be 
 traced to the shameful quarrels of the competing 
 tribes of Christians at the legendary birthplace and 
 tomb of Jesus, where the Turks have from time 
 immemorial had to preserve the peace, and pre- 
 vent the Christians from cutting each other's 
 throats. In the year 1847, ^^^ Greek Christians 
 were charged with removing a silver star which 
 was hung in the air in one of the Latin chapels by 
 way of marking one of the places where the 
 Savior was born. Then the Christian Govern- 
 ment of France interfered on behalf of Latin Chris- 
 tianity, and Christian Russia came promptly for- 
 ward on behalf of Greek Christianity ; and the 
 Porte, against which there was then no charge of 
 massacring Christians — its relation to Christianity 
 having consisted in preventing Christians from 
 massacring each other — was bullied by the Chris- 
 tian Powers alternately, till France and England 
 and the King of Sardinia joined in defending Tur- 
 key against Russia, with the results we all remem- 
 ber. 
 
 In that quarrel, public opinion in England was 
 substantially united. In the preface to a standard 
 * History of the Ottoman Empire *, by four writers 
 of good standing, pubHshed in 1854, allusion is 
 made to ** the deep interest now so universally felt 
 in the fate of Turkey, linked as that fate has be- 
 come with the interests of civilisation throughout 
 the world.'* That was the general tone. On 
 
International Ethics, 115 
 
 both sides, indeed, the war was one of popular 
 enthusiasm. As Molesworth records^: ''In the 
 churches of Russia and the mosques of Turkey a 
 crusade w^as preached with the most vehement en- 
 thusiasm.'* The religious attack bred the reli- 
 gious counter-crusade, Turks being as warlike as 
 other people ; and the Turkish Government was 
 forced to meet Russian menace with defiance, to 
 save itself at home. So it was in England. The 
 only two public men who steadfastly opposed Eng- 
 lish interference, Bright and Cobden, were for the 
 time virtually driven out of public life, and the 
 Press backed up Lord Palmerston in forcing a war 
 policy on his colleagues. *' Thus," says Moles- 
 worth : 
 
 " England, under the influence of panic and passion, 
 was being propelled .... into a war which all reason- 
 able men desired to avoid, and which by judicious manage- 
 ment might have been avoided. And what was the reason 
 of this? The chief cause, it appears to me, is to be found 
 in that secret and mysterious system of diplomacy which 
 did not prevent the English people from seeing much of 
 what was going on, but which did not allow them to see 
 the whole truth ; which revealed to them the faults of the 
 Russian Emperor, but cast a mantle over the nearly equal 
 faults of the Turkish Government ; which led the English 
 to regard the Czar as a monster of perfidy and ambition, 
 when he really was a proud but well-intentioned man, 
 
 blinded by passion and fanaticism The people saw 
 
 the occupation of the provinces, the tragedy of Sinope, 
 and other violent and foolish acts of the Russian Govern- 
 ment, as through a lurid haze, and thus Lord Aberdeen 
 was driven towards a policy which he thoroughly abhorred. 
 *Here I am,' he exclaimed to his intimate friends, 'with 
 
 * * History of England,' 1830-1874. Abridged ed. p. 346. 
 
 I 2 
 
116 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 one foot in the grave, placed against my will at the head 
 of the Ministry, and forced on to that bloodshed against 
 which, throughout the whole of my public career, I have 
 hitherto successfully struggled : ' and the old man wrung 
 his hands in an agony of impotent despair. Like the 
 doomed vessel which has entered the vortex of the Mael- 
 strom, he was being drifted into war." 
 
 What the war was, there is no need to say in 
 any detail. Mismanagement and misery in the 
 British camp ; decimation of the army by cold and 
 disease ; desultory operations by ill-united allies ; 
 distracted counsels ; heroic exploits, leading to 
 nothing but futile slaughter ; magnificent episodes 
 which *' were not war ** ; dreary sufferings which 
 were ; enormous efforts for the capture of one for- 
 tified place ; trivial triumph for a vast outlay of 
 blood and treasure ; and then peace and jubilation, 
 and the status quo ante bellum, with Greek and Latin 
 Christians still glaring murder at each other in 
 Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and the heathen Turk 
 still keeping the peace between them. 
 
 And now, without for the moment tracing what 
 has occurred between times, let us contrast the 
 picture of a few months ago. Again we have a 
 poet splendidly singing for war — the poet who, of 
 all in our day, best compares with Tennyson in 
 nobility of art and golden perfectness of diction — 
 the true inheritor of the Tennysonian mantle. 
 But this time the song is on the other side. In- 
 stead of the ^' doom of God on a giant liar " we 
 have the doom of God on the Great Assassin. 
 Instead of Turkey representing the interests of 
 civilisation, these interests are said to depend on 
 
International Ethics. 117 
 
 Turkey's overthrow. Russia is now the friend of 
 humanity ; and there is talk of handing over to 
 her the Christian provinces which the Moslem has 
 deluged with blood. In England, though not with 
 the old approach to unanimity, there are the old 
 transports of enthusiasm through whole strata 
 of society. What is more, whereas in 1854 the 
 anti-Russian feeling here was only in part reli- 
 gious, only in part one of sectarian Christianity, 
 the feeling is now in very large part one of Chris- 
 tian wrath against the Moslem assassin of Chris- 
 tians. This, of course, is denied ; but I must 
 take leave to insist on the statement. If anyone 
 will try to imagine a similar storm of English feel* 
 ing against, say, a Shah of Persia for extermina- 
 ting a heretical non-Christian sect, as the Babis 
 were exterminated in 1852 ; or against, say, China 
 for the massacre of the members of any Chinese 
 sect — if anyone will try to imagine such develop- 
 ments of feeling among us, he will find they are 
 inconceivable. Were Christian Spain to-day in a 
 position to expel a population of Mohammedans, 
 as she did in the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century, we might charge her with suicidal folly 
 and fanaticism, as well as with atrocious cruelty, 
 but we should not think of interfering. We may 
 depend upon it, the Christianity of the Armenians 
 has been for thousands of our countrymen the de- 
 termining ground for proposing the coercion of 
 Turkey, though they may often not be clearly con- 
 scious of it. And it is important to keep this in 
 
118 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 view. It was a kindred though less justified feel- 
 ing among Russian Christians which in 1854 and 
 since did most to inspire Russian fervor against 
 Turkey. The community of instinct in the 
 matter is instructive. 
 
 It may be said indeed that, whether the fact be 
 so or not, the English sentiments of 1896 were far 
 more justifiable than those of 1854 ; that in the 
 recent case the English people in large part really 
 rose above some of their old commercial jealousies, 
 and cared for nothing but the protection of the 
 downtrodden. This I do not dispute. But the 
 question which clearly forces itself upon us is this : 
 Is that nation justifiable which, within a space of 
 forty years, is seen thus alternately storming for 
 war against Russia, on behalf of Turkey ; and for 
 war in alliance with Russia, against Turkey? Are 
 those ups and downs of emotion suggestive of 
 good judgment or consistency of attitude? Are 
 those admirable poets trustworthy ethical guides? 
 
 Let us not answer hastily ; but first analyse 
 our problem, to make sure what it really is. 
 When we talk of nations doing this and that, we 
 are lumping complex facts for convenience under 
 a loose phrase. To think always of nations as 
 single-minded entities is to obscure the facts of 
 international life. In a sense, nations cannot be 
 convicted of inconsistency as individuals may, 
 though the inconsistency of individuals often goes 
 far to constitute inconsistency on the part of the 
 nation. We are not responsible, it may fairly be 
 
International Ethics. 119 
 
 urged, for acts of our predecessors of which we do 
 not approve, or for acts of our domestic oppo- 
 nents. In the recent episode, one part of our 
 nation resisted the proposals of another ; and 
 those who are ready to coerce Turkey are many 
 of them entitled to say that they never approved of 
 the Crimean war. And that brings us to the inter- 
 mediate facts of the Russo-Turkish history. 
 When, some twenty years ago, Russia once more 
 attacked Turkey, again avowedly in the interests 
 of the Sultan's Christian subjects, the Government 
 of this country, standing to the position of 1854, 
 designed to aid Turkey as then ; and were only 
 prevented doing so by the movement of public 
 feeling set up by Mr. Gladstone in his denuncia- 
 tion of the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. But, 
 despite that hindrance, our Government did on 
 the whole hinder that of the Czar in its professed 
 attempt to protect the Armenian and other Chris- 
 tian subjects of Turkey. We are now proposing, 
 many of us, to reverse what we did then. Our 
 problem, then, seems to be something like this : 
 Do bodies of well-meaning citizens do well to seek to 
 engage the nation as a whole, by the exercise of its 
 military power, in any act of intervention in the internal 
 affairs of a foreign country, in the knowledge that the 
 nation as a whole was so engaged, a generation ago, in an 
 act of intervention to a directly opposite purpose, and 
 that much more recently, despite domestic division of 
 opinion, its influence as a military power was to a certain 
 extent again used to that opposite purpose ? 
 
120 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 It may be squarely answered by many that men 
 may be doing quite well in such a case ; that the 
 wrong- action of their country in the previous 
 generation ought not to bind or silence them under 
 changed conditions now. And I admit that the 
 general proposition is quite arguable ; for, in a 
 sense, we are always to some extent undoing, of 
 necessity, the deeds and the plans of our fathers. 
 But to judge justly, we must look to more than 
 our present motives. We have to test our doc- 
 trine by analogy, and compare our moral position 
 in one issue with our moral position in another — 
 our moral position, be it observed, not that of our 
 predecessors, for it happens that, almost simul- 
 taneously with the recent demand for the coercion 
 of Turkey by England, singly or in concert with 
 other Powers, there occurred a case in which there 
 emerged for a moment the conception of a pos- 
 sible dream of the coercion of England by other 
 Powers. None of us can yet have forgotten it. 
 When the filibustering raid of certain British sub- 
 jects into the Transvaal was defeated, the Em- 
 peror of Germany sent a telegram of congratula- 
 tion to the Transvaal President. That sufficiently 
 tactless act was received in England with a perfect 
 passion of resentment ; and, though the telegram 
 probably meant no more than it said, which was 
 not much, it was treated as a broad hint that if 
 matters went further, Germany might interfere on 
 the Boers' behalf. And at a London banquet, 
 presided over by a minister of the Crown, shortly 
 
International Ethics. 121 
 
 afterwards, the Minister's declaration that ** under 
 no circumstances should we for a moment tolerate 
 foreign interference " in South Africa was vehe- 
 mently acclaimed by all present. And this did not 
 merely mean, observe, that ** we '* should resent 
 armed interference between us and the Boers ; it 
 meant that ** we '* denied the right of any Power 
 to attempt diplomatic interference. 
 
 Of course, as will be at once said, the cases were 
 very different. The act of our filibusters was 
 venial in comparison with the abominable and un- 
 wearying cruelties of the Turks against the miser- 
 able Armenians. In point of degree of guilt there 
 is no comparison. Turkey is several centuries 
 behind England in civilisation ; and Turkish 
 atrocities are on the plane of the Turkish stage of 
 civilisation. But since w^e have begun collating 
 the cases, let us collate them at a point where 
 comparison is more feasible. Let us go back in 
 English history a few centuries, to a point at 
 which English civilisation was in some respects 
 near the present Turkish level, albeit in other re- 
 spects far above it. Let us go back to the age of 
 Shakspere, and Sidney, and Spenser, the age of 
 Elizabeth and the Armada ; the age of heroic Pro- 
 testantism and of the beginnings of Puritanism ; 
 and let us imagine a studious member of 
 the Turkish Embassy in London addressing us 
 on the Elizabethan way of dealing with disaffection 
 in Ireland, as thus : 
 
 ** In those days, your Christian and Protestant 
 
122 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 nobles, serving under your Virgin Queen, carried 
 out in Christian and Catholic Ireland such mas- 
 sacres as well-nigh eclipse our Turkish atrocities 
 in the comparison. The provocation was rela- 
 tively slight. In Turkey to-day, the Armenians, 
 many of whom so long farmed our taxes, are re- 
 garded by our ignorant and fanatical population 
 as irksome interlopers, usurers, undercutting and 
 unscrupulous competitors in trade, as well as in- 
 fidels ; and, while the official massacres are to be 
 set down to official cruelty and the brutality of the 
 professional soldier class, the Constantinople out- 
 rages are the outcome of all this old-standing 
 jealousy, roused to murderous passion by the news 
 of a revolutionary conspiracy. It is certainly all 
 vile and abominable enough. But let us go back 
 to the deeds of your Protestant forefathers, at a 
 stage of civilisation at which your race could pro- 
 duce a Shakspere, a Bacon, a Spenser. Let me 
 read to you the words in which some of those con- 
 cerned in the official massacres of the Popish in- 
 habitants of Ireland described their performances. 
 It is the godly and Bible-loving Lord-Deputy 
 Chichester who writes : 
 
 " ' I burned all along the Lough (Neagh), within four 
 miles of Dungannon, and killed loo people, sparing none, 
 of what quality, age, or sex, soever, besides many burned 
 to death. We killed man, woman, and child, horse, beast, 
 and whatsoever we could find.' 
 
 ** It is Sir Nicholas Malby, President of Con- 
 
International Ethics, 123 
 
 naught, who writes thus of his harrying of the 
 
 Burkes' country : 
 
 " * With determination to consume them with fire and 
 sword, sparing neither old nor young, I entered their moun- 
 tains, I burnt all their corn and houses, and committed to 
 
 the sword all that could be found I assaulted a 
 
 castle where the garrison surrendered. I put them to the 
 misericordia of my soldiers. They were all slain.' 
 
 **That was the direct slaughter. But for every 
 one slain by the sword, perhaps a hundred 
 perished by the far direr death of famine, famine 
 deliberately planned and wrought by the English 
 commanders, who found they could kill more by 
 starvation than by any other means. And your 
 ancestors looked on ; and your poet Spenser de- 
 scribes sights such as will compare in horror with 
 anything in modern history, down to and including 
 the Armenian atrocities. The native annalists 
 tell that the English soldiers twirled infants on the 
 points of their spears, drove unresisting men and 
 women into barns and burned them to death, and 
 killed blind and feeble men, women, boys, and 
 girls, sick persons, idiots, and old people. And it 
 is the English Froude who comments : 
 
 " * The English nation was shuddering over the atrocities 
 of the Duke of Alva. The children in the nurseries were 
 being inflamed to patriotic rage and madness by tales of 
 Spanish tyranny ; yet Alva's bloody sword never touched 
 the young, the defenceless, or those whose sex even dogs 
 could recognise and respect.' " 
 
 If the unspeakable Turk were thus to speak, I 
 do not see how we could effectively answer him. 
 It might be replied, of course, that we to-day re- 
 
124 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 probate those old English cruelties as much as we 
 do those of the Turks in Armenia ; that we are 
 not responsible for our ancestors. But that is 
 really not the point. The pertinent ethical ques- 
 tion is this : — If the Spanish Armada of 1588, 
 which actually was in part provoked by the Eng- 
 lish massacres of Irish Catholics, had been 
 avowedly undertaken expressly in order to punish 
 these, and to save Ireland from them for the 
 future ; if, instead of expressing a Catholic de- 
 sire to suppress Protestantism as such, it had 
 been a simple expression of just indignation at 
 Protestant cruelty, should w^e to-day look back 
 upon it with any more sympathy than we 
 actually do? Should we consider it a 
 justifiable invasion? I confess I cannot for 
 a moment believe that we should. That 
 is to say, those citizens who have been calling for 
 the coercion of Turkey would not cease to take 
 the patriotic view of the Armada. They would 
 just point to the cruelties of the Spaniards in 
 Mexico and Peru, as the English of the Eliza- 
 bethan age did, and as those of Dryden's age ex- 
 claimed at the cruelties of the Protestant Dutch. 
 Finally, to come down nearer our own day ; 
 supposing that Napoleon had invaded Ireland at 
 the close of last century to punish the horrible 
 cruelties committed by our troops in the suppres- 
 sion of the Irish rebellion of 1798, and to relieve 
 the Irish Catholics from the tyranny under which 
 they had lain so long ; or supposing that the in- 
 
International Ethics. 125 
 
 vasion which was actually attempted, and failed, 
 had been undertaken expressly, as it was partly, 
 in resentment of the long and ruinous misgovern- 
 ment of Ireland by England, should we to-day 
 applaud the French in the matter? Again, I must 
 say, I do not think we should. Many of us are 
 still so far from taking a decently impartial view 
 of international ethics as to fail even to see the 
 unjustifiableness of Pitt's policy, pushed on by 
 Burke, of forcing war on the new French Repub- 
 lic, with a view to destroying it, in punishment for 
 the execution of the king and queen, and to the 
 end of rooting out democratic principles. We are 
 still in the day of blind instincts, blind patriotism, 
 blind indignation, blind religious zeal. And when 
 it is thus clear that we can never answer 
 for our own nation in respect of its own mis- 
 deeds, and that we can never be sure that in 
 a given crisis its rulers will not seek to use its 
 military power in a way of which many of us 
 utterly disapprove, it surely becomes no less clear 
 that we do ill, any number of us, to propose to 
 use its military power to coerce any other nation. 
 Christian or other, into right courses in its inter- 
 nal affairs, no matter how gross may be the mis- 
 conduct which has aroused our indignation. The 
 principle will not stand ethical tests. 
 
 I say the principle, in the general sense. I 
 have thus far looked at the case in the light of the 
 fundamental moral principle of doing as we would 
 be done by. It may still be urged, however, that 
 
126 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 it may be well at a pinch even to override that 
 principle, if haply by so doing- we can save inno- 
 cent lives from frightful suffering. Here the test 
 is one of empirical utility, or hand-to-mouth oppor- 
 tunism. And here again I will admit that the 
 point is arguable. In recent times, it may be 
 urged, we actually have coerced aliens in such 
 matters as the suppression of the slave-trade, 
 though less than two centuries ago our fathers 
 were the great slave-traders of Europe. What 
 happened in that case was that the more humane 
 of our nation gradually got the upper hand 
 of the inhumane ; so that W3 have seen 
 Mr. Gladstone, whose father was a slave- 
 holder, and who in his early youth defended 
 the management of his father's slave-estates 
 in Parliament, live not only to repent his 
 partial sympathy with the cause of the South in 
 the American Civil War, but to take concerted 
 steps, as a Minister, with other Powers, for the 
 suppression of the slave-trade nearer home. Yet 
 even here our record is somewhat chequered. 
 When, less than thirty years ago, the then Khe- 
 dive of Egypt undertook, in defiance of a strong 
 feeling among his own subjects, to suppress the 
 slave-trade in the Soudan, our Press was far from 
 giving him sympathy and encouragement. On 
 this we have the decisive testimony of Sir Samuel 
 Baker, whom the Khedive employed to do the 
 work. 
 " Few persons," writes Sir Samuel, '* have considered 
 
International Ethics, 127 
 
 the position of the Egyptian ruler when attacking the insti- 
 tution most cherished by his people. The employment of 
 an European to overthrow the slave-trade in deference to 
 the opinion of the civilised world, was a direct challenge 
 and attack upon the assumed rights and necessities of his 
 own subjects. The magnitude of the operation cannot be 
 understood by the general public in Europe. Every house- 
 hold in Upper Egypt and in the Delta was dependent upon 
 slave service ; the fields in the Soudan were cultivated by 
 slaves ; the women in the harems of both rich and middle- 
 class were attended by slaves ; the poorer Arab woman's 
 ambition was to possess a slave ; in fact, Egyptian society 
 without slaves would be like a carriage devoid of wheels — 
 it could not proceed." And while the Khedive " sacrificed 
 his popularity in Egypt, his policy was misconstrued by 
 the Powers he had sought to gratify. He was accused of 
 civilising ' through the medium of fire and sword ' by the 
 same English journals which are now (1878) extolling the 
 prowess of the British arms in Caffraria and the newly- 
 annexed Transvaal."* 
 
 Here, observe, was a Mohammedan ruler trying- 
 to suppress slavery under difficulties such as were 
 probably never grappled with by any Christian 
 ruler ; yet we give to the memory of the late 
 Khedive no such honor as we pay to Christian 
 emancipators. May it not be, one asks in pass- 
 ing, that his experience of Christian justice may 
 have had something to do with the indifference of 
 later Moslem rulers to Christian appeals for inter- 
 ference with slave-trading? 
 
 Still, let us suppose the point of immediate 
 utility pressed, without regard to the point of con- 
 sistency. Would it be well, then, to resort to 
 armed coercion of a Moslem Power in order to 
 
 * Sir S. Baker, ' Ismailia,' ed. 1878, pref. 
 
128 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 protect its Christian subjects? Let us apply the 
 test of utility, of expediency, all round, and with 
 vigilance. What, let us ask, would such a war 
 mean? Let us say nothing of the fact that the 
 burden of the cost would largely fall on 
 poor men, and that the men sent as sol- 
 diers would be anybody but the people 
 who clamored for the war. Let us simply imagine 
 the campaign. Some among us picture a mere 
 display of naval and miHtary power, and an im- 
 mediate collapse of the Porte, the Sick Man, as 
 we have been calling the Sultans of Turkey for at 
 least fifty years. Others, however, even on the 
 same side, point out that the recent massacres 
 are fruits of the Turkish system, that at least 
 there must be a change of Sultans ; and that even 
 a change of Sultans would give small security for 
 the future. Then it is suggested that Armenia, 
 or for that matter all Turkey, should be handed 
 over to Russia. Thus are the problems of inter- 
 national ethics still grappled with among us. It 
 may perhaps suffice to say here that those who 
 think to dispose of the Turks in mass in that 
 fashion have miscalculated rather badly. They 
 suppose the Turkish nation has little power of re- 
 sistance ; hence their readiness to attack it — an- 
 other unpleasing feature of our international 
 ethics. We never talk of so attacking a military 
 power believed to be strong, no matter how much 
 we may sympathise with its victims — be it Austria 
 tyrannising in Italy in the last generation, or 
 
 \ 
 
International Ethics. 129 
 
 Prussia coercing Denmark. We select the Sick 
 Man, so called, as a hopeful case. Yet those who 
 look deepest into the matter will probably be the 
 most ready to admit that an attempt to over- 
 throw the Turkish power would be met with a 
 national resistance of such energy and tenacity 
 as might make even a coalition of invading Powers 
 glad to come to a compromise. Russian inva- 
 sions of Turkey in the past have not gone to show 
 that Turkey was very much the sicker power of 
 the two. And meantime, what would be the fate 
 of the surviving Armenians? If Khurds and 
 Turks shed blood as we have seen when their 
 country is not being invaded on behalf of the Ar- 
 menians, what would they do if it were? 
 
 And if, by a desperate effort, involving the shed- 
 ding of blood in a thousandfold degree, a coalition 
 of European Powers should succeed in beating 
 down the Turkish nation, and should then agree 
 to hand over either Turkey or Armenia to Rus- 
 sian control, what then? England would so ex- 
 hibit herself in the eyes of Europe as strictly dis- 
 interested — a character she is certainly not usually 
 held by foreigners to fulfil. But would the gain 
 to civilisation be so great, after all? Are many 
 of us of opinion that the management of Russian 
 home affairs by the Russian Government is quite 
 a triumphant contrast with the internal polity of 
 Turkey? Let us assume, if we will, that we our- 
 selves, ** we '* as a nation, are blameless ; and 
 that our rule in Ireland can give no scandal to 
 
 K 
 
180 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 French and Germans. And let us forget our old 
 sympathies with the Poles — "the Irish of the 
 Continent,*' as our Prince Albert called them. 
 But can we really bring ourselves to feel that the 
 rule which has deported to Siberia and done to 
 death in dungeons so many thousands of justice- 
 seeking, humanity-loving, and high-hoping men 
 and women — so often for nothing more than the 
 bare cherishing of their hopes — is a rule we should 
 like to see imposed on any other country? To be 
 sure, most of the exiled Nihilists are Atheists ; 
 but are they really worse men and women than 
 the Armenians? And when we remember how a 
 few years ago the same autocracy drove out of 
 Russia myriads of Jews, on the score of their race 
 and their creed, can we feel that it is quite a safe 
 sort of authority to set up over Moslems any- 
 where? If our Christian philanthropists can 
 wink at wholesale cruelty to Atheists, can they be 
 quite as indifferent to the expulsion of the Russian 
 Jews? Were not the reasons given for that ex- 
 pulsion very like some of the Turkish reasons for 
 massacring Armenians? Is it that we are to 
 tolerate wholesale expulsion and deportation, and 
 only to draw the line at massacre? 
 
 Surely, surely, this problem is not to be solved 
 as so many among us have thought to solve it. 
 Surely we must carry our international ethics a 
 little further, a little deeper. Surely the principles 
 of goodwill, of persuasion, of curative education, 
 must count for something in international as in 
 
International Ethics. 181 
 
 domestic policy. Do we ever ask ourselves how 
 the Turkish civilisation has come to be so back- 
 ward, so unprogressive, the Government so bad 
 in itself, so powerless to check the ferocity and 
 fanaticism of its subjects, even when it would fain 
 do so? The question is well worth putting. 
 Buckle said he could write the history of Turkish 
 civilisation on the back of his hand. I wish he 
 had done it, even on that scale, with his exact and 
 comprehensive knowledge, and his luminous 
 breadth of view. But in the back-of-the-hand 
 fashion we might try it for ourselves. 
 
 Perhaps you may think it shows an unhealthy 
 sympathy with a guilty race to try to estimate its 
 conditions dispassionately. I can only say on 
 that, that I have no special sympathy with Turks, 
 no such esteem for them as many English travel- 
 lers have expressed. It is not easy for a ration- 
 alist to get up a special sympathy with the most 
 religious nation in Europe — for such is Turkey. 
 Those moralists who hold that a belief in Deity 
 is the great moralising principle in human affairs 
 should take due note of the fact that Turkey is 
 the most devoutly God-fearing nation in existence. 
 And those Christians who see in almsgiving the 
 great test of the degree and sincerity of a man*s 
 philanthropy, should take due notice of the fact 
 that in Turkey there is proportionately more alms- 
 giving done than in any other European country. 
 The average Turk is the typical God-fearing man, 
 and a daily benefactor of the poor. Still, all this 
 
132 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 does not draw us to him. Professor Flint, if I re- 
 member rightly, has somewhere published a letter 
 addressed to him by a Turkish gentleman, expres- 
 sing the hope that his nation, as a race of unflinch- 
 ing theists, will one day co-operate powerfully 
 with the theists of other countries in maintaining 
 the doctrine of one God. And thisy in view of 
 recent events, does not draw us to him either. 
 But still we may so explain Turkish civilisation as 
 to give a more humane and a more hopeful view 
 of it than is taken by those who pronounce it past 
 saving, and those who, like Mr. Gladstone, talk 
 of driving the Turk, " bag and baggage '*, out of 
 Europe — on the good old judicial principle of tell- 
 ing bad characters to go and live in some other 
 parish. It is instructive to meet with these pre- 
 scriptions, as a practical outcome of the religion 
 which professes to inculcate universal brotherhood, 
 the love of enemies, and the inevitable conversion 
 of all mankind to the true faith. 
 
 Mere human reason, when it can rise above the 
 crude instincts through which it first comes into 
 play, gradually arrives at a humaner view. It 
 decides that the Turks are not any more innately 
 insusceptible of civilisation and progress than any 
 other race, European or Asian. Like all other 
 races, so called, they have long been very much 
 mixed ; and they have among them the blood, as 
 the phrase goes, of ancient Romans, Greeks, 
 Arabs, Assyrians, Persians, and other stocks, 
 "Aryan '' and " non- Aryan ". And they are not 
 
International Ethics. 183 
 
 at all normally ferocious, though when the beast 
 in them is roused they behave as we know, as our 
 ancestors behaved three centuries ago, ay, and 
 one century ago. Their vices are of three main 
 sorts — the animal vices of a backward civilisation; 
 the civic vices of an old militarist despotism ; the 
 intellectual vices of a people hypnotised by a 
 Sacred Book. In respect of these they conform 
 at a variety of points to one or other of all the 
 known civilisations of the past, including our own; 
 exhibiting in general the same laws, the same 
 potentialities. And that they have so long been 
 unprogressive is due, on the one hand to their 
 pietism, which shuns new ideas, and on the other 
 hand to their isolation in a hostile Christian world, 
 which keeps them constantly menaced with fanati- 
 cal attack, and thus aloof from the ideas of other 
 lands. At this moment, what of energy Turkey 
 has is mainly spent on her military establishments. 
 Proportionately to her wealth, she is enormously 
 militarist ; what provision she makes for the 
 scientific training of her youth is mainly military ; 
 and this perforce, from the Turkish point of view, 
 because the Turkish Empire, ever since its estab- 
 lishment, has been confronted by Christian enemies 
 seeking its destruction. 
 
 It may be said that this is the penalty of the 
 original act of conquest. Very true ; but the 
 question for modern Europe, partly delivered from 
 fanaticism, is whether the ancient curse must for 
 ever operate. For centuries the neighbour 
 
184 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 Powers, Russia and Austria, inheritors of the 
 medieval Christian feud with Islam, have made 
 the Turks feel that they must arm or perish. Thus 
 Turkey's whole strength and thought, apart from 
 religion, runs to militarism, with the natural re- 
 sults. Must this dead-lock for ever subsist? If 
 so, the Armenian question in some form must sub- 
 sist ; and Turkey will continue to be a thorn in 
 the side of civilised Europe. But if only the 
 Christian nations, so called, can learn to adopt a 
 spirit of fraternity, instead of one of scorn and 
 hostility, they may not only secure by moral 
 suasion such measures as were taken by the late 
 Khedive of Egypt under the mere pressure of 
 opinion, but may lead to the gradual cure of the 
 worst vices of Turkish civil administration. Dur- 
 ing the past seventy years, intercourse between 
 Constantinople and the rest of Europe has continu- 
 ally increased ; with the result that in spite of all 
 the inertia of Islam, and all the mind-benumbing 
 power of the Sacred Book, a new sap stirs in the 
 nation's frame, and change proceeds both out- 
 wardly and inwardly. It only needs that this 
 should be furthered by peaceful intercourse rather 
 than repressed by violence, till there too the 
 ancient reign of despotism shall give place to a 
 progressive compromise, in which the human 
 spirit shall grow to what of dignity and self-rule 
 is possible to it. Fifty years ago, a correspondent 
 of the TimeSy following the fortunes of Kossuth 
 from Hungary to Turkey, decided after study that 
 
International Ethics. 136 
 
 nothing could save Turkey from internal decay 
 while her Government remained despotic. One 
 day, he was convinced, the State must fall ; but 
 one day Russia, too, might fall in the same 
 fashion, unless ** some violent uprising of the 
 popular impulses " availed to subvert the evil 
 system.* That is a principle which holds good of 
 all civilisations, all races whatsoever. There can 
 be no permanently healthy and happy civilisation 
 under a despotism, be it of Sultan, Czar, Emperor, 
 Pope, priest, church, mollah, or prophet. 
 
 Many will doubtless say that the case is past 
 hope. Such verdicts are always forthcoming. 
 The sufficient answer is this, that if the Turkish 
 civilisation be hopeless, there is no sign of any- 
 thing much more hopeful among the Levantine 
 populations. Let us remember, the verdict of 
 many generations was as decisive against Greeks 
 and Armenians as it has latterly been against the 
 Turks. The writer whom I have just cited quotes 
 it as ** an established maxim which has prevailed 
 in the Levant from time immemorial, that no re- 
 liance can be placed on the words of either Greek 
 or Armenian."! And when the Greeks made their 
 war of independence, it was a current saying in 
 this country that many men went hence to the 
 Peloponnesus to help, expecting to find the men 
 of Pericles, and came back convinced that the in- 
 habitants of Newgate were the more moral types. 
 
 ♦Pridham, * Kossuth and Magyarland,' 1851, p. 298. 
 tWork cited, p. 285. 
 
186 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 Greece has since made great progress, though not 
 all that was hoped ; but that any progress has been 
 made is clearly due not to innate or hereditary 
 virtues in the stock, which has much in common 
 with the Turkish. It is due to the effect of educa- . 
 tion and free institutions, which can purify a 
 nation *s blood even when they fever it. The 
 Turks have just as many fundamental good points 
 to work upon as the rival races, Asian, Greek, 
 and Slav. Kossuth has told the story of the re- 
 fusal of the Sultan to give him up, with his fellow 
 fugitives from Hungary, when they sought Tur- 
 kish protection, though Austria threatened war. 
 The counsellors of the Porte in Divan advised sur- 
 render ; but the Sultan, Abdul Medjid, rose from 
 his seat, lifted up his hands, and said : "Allah is 
 powerful, I trust in his protection. But if I must 
 perish, may I perish with honour. I will not 
 bring upon my name the disgrace of violating the 
 rights of hospitality, by surrendering to the ven- 
 geance of their enemies the unfortunates who have 
 
 sought my protection Having sought it, 
 
 they shall obtain it. Come what may, I will not 
 surrender them. This is my determination, and 
 thus it shall be. Consider the means of defence.'** 
 So that, if some Commanders of the Faithful be 
 great assassins, mad or sane, others have been 
 brave men and true. 
 
 In fine, we do but reach the old lesson that the 
 
 * Kossuth, ' Memories of my Exile,' Eng. tr. Pref, 
 
International Ethics. 187 
 
 Kingdom of Heaven cometh not by violence. 
 Turkey is worse to-day for the Crimean War, for 
 past war in general. The sword is not a civiliser; 
 and under its shadow there grow all manner of 
 poisonous plants and creeping things. We have 
 all, I think, come to this view in face of the re- 
 cent risks of war between our nation and the kin- 
 dred republic beyond seas. That such a chance 
 should be made, either by the obstinacy of an 
 English statesman who refused to arbitrate in a 
 difference with a small State because he held our 
 case to be too good to permit of dispute, or by 
 the wantonness of tongue of an American states- 
 man, bidding for Anglophobe votes, is for most of 
 us a thing to shudder over. Happily, reason and 
 goodwill have on both sides prevailed ; and this, 
 with other shadows of evil of the past year, has 
 passed away. Few men now affect to believe with 
 Tennyson, that a war cures any of the wrongs and 
 shames of peace, or makes noble thought freer. 
 But the gain from the lesson will not be secure 
 unless, in congratulating ourselves on our escape, 
 we also take to heart the need for a more worthy 
 and more self-examining spirit among us all in 
 the future. The great safeguard against a wan- 
 ton yielding to the stirrings of primeval passion 
 against other States, is a habit of remembering 
 the misdeeds of our own ; and the answer to all 
 the voices of national and spiritual pride, be they 
 of poet or of priest, is that old one, so seldom 
 acted on by those who profess to hold it divine : 
 
188 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 '* First take the beam out of thine own eye.*' 
 Cure the evils at home, the age-long miseries that 
 subsist in silence, without noise and garments 
 rolled in blood ; the systems which slay by law 
 and without weapons, making thousands home- 
 less in the name of justice and the sacred rights of 
 possession. Mr. Watson, in one of his Armenian 
 poems, has a fine verse, picturing the houseless 
 victims, roofed only by 
 
 " Cold splendors of the inhospitable night, 
 Augustly unregardful." 
 
 But these pitiless fires have shone as coldly, if not 
 as splendidly, in northern skies, over maddened 
 Irish peasants, and expatriated Highland clans- 
 men, and starving English vagrants, as over the 
 tortured wretches of Armenia ; and our great 
 poets have never sung for those. And he best 
 reads the lesson of the stars who learns under 
 them to feel, not the transient passion of wrath 
 against the criminals of a day, but the 
 sadness of the endless errancy of man. 
 Beneath that canopy, the poet's own most 
 passionate cry, urging us to war, becomes 
 one with the other voices of Nature, not to 
 be taken as oracles of any God. If we cannot 
 trust our Press, if we cannot trust our pulpit, to 
 speak the words of wisdom and soberness in times 
 of perturbation, how shall we trust our poets? 
 When the multitude of counsellors fail to exorcise 
 evil instinct, how shall the lyrist as such succeed ? 
 It is no special imputation on him to mark him 
 
International Ethics. 189 
 
 for distrust when we must distrust teachers from 
 whom at times we have had steady light and lead- 
 ing. Burke, who in his sane days denounced with 
 noble passion the heedless promoters of war be- 
 tween kindred, lived to be miserably false to his 
 own teaching, to preach a war of civilisations with 
 the voice of a madman, glorying in its duration, 
 its fierceness, its bloodiness. The beast beneath, 
 emerging through some flaw of blood and brain, 
 had triumphed in him over the humanist and the 
 sane statesman. If such men fail us, how shall 
 we trust our own random impulses, our own spon- 
 taneous enthusiasms ? Are not both sides in every 
 quarrel alike enthusiastic? If the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, from the transcendental point of view, 
 Cometh not by observation ; from that of moral 
 science, to which the Kingdom of Heaven is well- 
 being on earth, it does so come, and in no other 
 way ; and the moral value of enthusiasm to create 
 and uphold good can be secured only by submit- 
 ting it on every issue to the unchanging tests of 
 all conduct — consistency, utility, rectitude. 
 
 Some time ago I had the opportunity of hearing 
 a distinguished living statesman deliver an address 
 at the unveiling of one more Burns statue in a 
 Scotch town. It was a brilliant address, witty, 
 intelligent, broad in view, and finished in phrase ; 
 but, though attentively listened to, it evoked no 
 great applause. One speculated whether at length 
 the native worship of Burns was becoming self- 
 critical, after being so long otherwise, or whether 
 
140 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 it was that the touches of other criticism in the 
 address were not sufficiently agreeable to the 
 patriotic sense. At length the audience was of a 
 sudden roused into signal excitement and 
 applause ; but it was not over anything about 
 Burns and Scottish culture. It was over a pas- 
 sage on the value of enthusiasm, as shown at that 
 hour, " when a mighty wave of moral passion is 
 sweeping over the land, and we see what we can 
 see in no other country — a nation alight with dis- 
 interested moral enthusiasm, with a towering in- 
 dignation against the oppressor, and a glowing 
 sympathy with the oppressed." As soon as the 
 cheering v/as over, it was clear what had hap- 
 pened. The audience had been simply applaud- 
 ing themselves. It was the sentiment of Tenny- 
 son over again : ' ' We are noble still ' ' — we are 
 very fine people indeed, full of noble and disin- 
 terested sympathy — with the victims of other 
 peoples. 
 
 When it has come to that with us it is time to 
 retrace our steps in sober retrospect. If it is our 
 own virtue that thrills us, our sympathy has 
 already lost its virtue ; its springs are tainted. 
 Its original generosity is worn out when we plume 
 ourselves on our generosity. And this is finally 
 what is wrong with international ethics every- 
 where : men allow themselves, in national capa- 
 cities and in international relations, all manner of 
 self-praise and arrogance and scorn, which in in- 
 dividual relations, whether between them and 
 
Inter national Ethics. 141 
 
 foreigners or between fellow-citizens, would be 
 counted odious, and expressive of coarse and ill- 
 bred natures. To this limitation of average moral 
 judgment is to be traced the inveterate survival of 
 the spirit of war. When Grotius wrote his 
 great treatise on the * Law of War and Peace *, he 
 lamented that, though one God was the father of 
 all men, all nations were madly ready to go to war 
 with each other, the Christians being worse than 
 the barbarians. He hoped his treatise might lead 
 them to mend their ways ; but though it may 
 have modified some of the usages of war, it has in 
 no wise cast out the passion. So that we to-day 
 have a right to say that the ideal of the Father- 
 hood of God, and the ethic annexed to that ideal, 
 have failed from age to age to teach men to live 
 as brothers ; and that the hopes of humanity in 
 the future must centre on the growth of the spirit 
 which seeks to solve all human problems in the 
 light of human reason and human experience, test- 
 ing all instincts as it tests all dogmas and all be- 
 liefs. 
 
EQUALITY. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 (1886.) 
 
 ** Equality,** says a distinguished living judge, in 
 a book that is less heard of to-day than it was ten 
 years ago — ** equality, like liberty, appears to me 
 to be a big name for a small thing. "^ It seems 
 probable that, though the speaker is a jurist, he 
 he does not here say quite what he means. To 
 say that equality or liberty is a big name, is to say 
 that it points to a great aspiration or an important 
 principle ; in which case the sentence is either a 
 mere contradiction in terms, or a simple assertion 
 that the results men have to show for the demo- 
 cratic creed fall very far short of the ideal. That 
 is, liberty and equality, as conceived by those who 
 framed and those who have adopted the well- 
 known motto, were terms implying a great amount 
 of unattained good ; while it turns out that mere 
 liberty so far as we have or can at present have 
 it, and equality so far as it has gone or can yet go 
 in Europe, leave a great deal to be desired. So be 
 it : but the fact surely goes to prove rather that 
 the true liberty and the true equality are very great 
 things ; that the big names are really big names 
 in the only intelligible sense — that of expressing 
 
 * James Fitzjames Stephen, * Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
 ternity,' 1873, p. 253. 
 
 ( H2 ) 
 
Equality. 143 
 
 great ideas, none the less great because still to be 
 realised. And in this connection it may be per- 
 mitted to wonder somewhat at the zeal with which 
 some powerful minds in these days set themselves 
 to blacken and belittle what was after all, on the 
 face of it, the formula of an ideal condition to be 
 aimed at and not a description of what had been 
 attained. Other ideals receive an astonishingly 
 lenient treatment in comparison. The aims of 
 primitive Christianity, let it be remembered, have 
 sometimes been sketched in terms almost identical 
 with the Republican motto — I will not say with 
 what amount of accuracy — and the claim in that 
 case seems to be regarded as its own vindication. 
 It is not now seriously pretended that the ideal first 
 Christians achieved their ends any more than the 
 enthusiasts of later times ; but it seems to be im- 
 puted as a virtue to the former that they had an 
 ideal ; while the too high hopes of the latter seem 
 to be viewed as mere matter for contumely. And 
 yet it would not be difficult to show that to the 
 movement of sentiment which arose with them is 
 to be traced nearly every forward principle of these 
 times. All that is best in our morality is found to 
 have had its re-birth, if not its birth, among the 
 generation which first invoked those great names 
 of liberty, equality, fraternity. And, granting 
 that there has been much foolish talk and much 
 short-sighted rejoicing over the mere traffic in the 
 words, apart from any substantial production of 
 the things, it is still not at all clear that the dis- 
 
144 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 missal of the whole as foolish is so eminently prac- 
 tical a proceeding as it claims to be. Take, for 
 instance, the word happiness — a big name, surely, 
 and one which by the general consent of the human 
 race has never yet been married to permanent 
 fact : I am not aware that any modern writer of 
 the practical school compiles books to discredit 
 happiness, though some authorities have certainly 
 adjured us not to make happiness our end and aim. 
 But judicial-minded gentlemen, who at other times 
 profess to find life on the whole very tolerable, 
 will take the trouble to look out a motto, in the 
 original Greek, from the great pessimist ^schy- 
 lus, by way of lending weight to their assault on a 
 forecast of human happiness which analyses the 
 matter into a few broad social conceptions. 
 
 Now this deprecatory exordium in a manner 
 confesses that what I want to put to you is not 
 any great triumph of equality thus far ; and not 
 even any possible attainment of equality, by poli- 
 tical or other specific means, in the near future, 
 but rather the doctrine that the principle of 
 equality is a great ideal, and that the ultimate 
 failure of humanity to realise it would practically 
 mean the ultimate failure of civilisation — certainly 
 the disappointment of the most important of the 
 other practical aspirations for the future of man- 
 kind. And, in order to make this out, it will not 
 be necessary to apply an extremely exalted stan- 
 dard to life, or to carry the notion of evolution to 
 the highest points of imaginary perfection. A 
 
Equality, 145 
 
 very cursory survey of actual conditions will dis- 
 cover the extent of the evil ; and a much im- 
 proved state of things, will, I think, be found to 
 be not so very Utopian or visionary. 
 
 The ordinary tone, it must be confessed, is 
 against equality. One sees^ to begin with, that 
 many politicians who speak respectfully — and 
 even, on given occasions, enthusiastically — of 
 liberty, and who have nothing very distinct to say 
 against fraternity, are quite positive that equality 
 is pure delusion and nonsense. It is not merely 
 the opponents of democracy who take this tone. 
 One who cannot at all be so described, and a very 
 different kind of writer from our judicial authority 
 — the Austrian Dr. Max Nordau, whose book has 
 been suppressed by the Austrian Government — is 
 found declaring that 
 
 " Equality is a chimera of book-worms and visionaries, 
 who have never studied nature and humanity with their 
 
 own eyes Fraternity? Oh, this is a sublime word, 
 
 the ideal goal of human progress, a presage of the condi- 
 tion of our race at the time when it attains to the summit 
 of its fullest development, a time still very r^ote. But 
 equality? That is a mere creature of the imagination, for 
 which there is no room in any sensible discussion."* 
 
 This is damping ; and yet I take leave to 
 attempt the vindication of the tabooed principle. 
 
 After all, the terms fraternity and equality to a 
 large extent cover the same ground ; and it is not 
 very clear how the fullest fraternity can be realised 
 
 ♦'The Conventional Lies of Civilisation,' Eng. trans., 
 pp. 1 17-8. 
 
 L 
 
146 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 without such an attainment of equality as will 
 carry us to our ideal. If you really feel that every 
 man is your brother, how shall you rest content 
 with leaving anyone to endure the disadvantages 
 which befall him under his inferiority of gifts? 
 How exclude any from your society as not being 
 attractive company enough? But I am not seek- 
 ing merely to balance definitions against one an- 
 other. I want you to look at this as a practical 
 question, and to take the ideas in their plain signi- 
 ficance. Now, Dr. Nordau cannot have supposed 
 that equality, as understood by its advocates, has 
 the truly chimerical meaning of absolute sameness 
 of faculty all round : he must have understood that 
 it meant, in however wide a sense, equality of 
 status — what our legal critic was thinking of when 
 he said that equality before the law is difficult, 
 but equality in society impossible. This then is 
 the problem. Fraternity is commonly understood 
 to be a spirit of general, undefined goodwill to our 
 fellow creatures, and to stop short of the realisa- 
 tion of a life of anything like actual brotherhood : 
 must we rest content with this? Whatever be the 
 full bearing of the word fraternity, we know that 
 in practice thus far it has signified something short 
 of equality. The history of Christianity is a de- 
 cisive proof. It has always been a Christian doc- 
 trine that believers are brethren in Christ, personal 
 merits or gifts availing nothing for salvation. It 
 is recorded, you may remember, of a distinguished 
 Scotch clergyman, that when a lady of rank once 
 
Equality, 147 
 
 expressed to him her disturbance at the idea of 
 meeting her tradesmen and other inferiors on equal 
 terms in heaven, he promptly assured her that she 
 need be under no apprehension on the subject, as 
 vshe would never reach heaven while she remained 
 m that frame of mind. And though you find 
 Shakspere, in ' King John \ making Queen Con- 
 stance talk of meeting her son in ** the court of 
 heaven '*, meaning the aristocratic or royal 
 quarter, it is nevertheless certain that the Church 
 has in all ages — however gross might be its syco- 
 phancy in practice, and however it might foster 
 wars within Christendom — taught as matter of 
 doctrine that Christians are one in Christ, and 
 ought to love one another as brothers on that 
 account even during this life. But who, save the 
 special pleaders of the churches, will say that there 
 has on the whole been any more practical fraternity 
 or equality under Christianity during the ages of 
 faith than under Paganism? It is possible, then, 
 to hold fraternity in theory without at all approxi- 
 mating to equality or brotherhood in fact. If, 
 therefore, we are to look at the matter to good 
 purpose, and not merely to deal with abstractions, 
 we must ask ourselves whether social equality is 
 not both a profoundly desirable and a possible 
 thing ; and whether, on accepting the spirit of it, 
 we may not adjust our whole daily lives to the 
 bringing of it into manifold practice. 
 
 Some of you may be repelled at the outset by 
 the surmise that any such thorough-going pre- 
 
148 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 scription of equality must amount to the pure and 
 simple advocacy of Socialism, as we have it in 
 these days ; but the ideas are essentially distinct. 
 How far the ultimate ideals would coincide is in- 
 deed a clearly contingent question ; but the 
 preaching of equality seems to me to go on differ- 
 ent lines from the ordinary preaching of Socialism. 
 Socialism, as understood by all schools, is a matter 
 of machinery for the lessening of economic evil, 
 and I do not now direct your attention to economic 
 evil at all. Nor am I prescribing political 
 machinery. Practical as the matter is, it is chiefly 
 on the side of feeling that I would like to present 
 it. 
 
 The idea of equality has in these days already 
 gone far enough to bring it about that when we 
 consider the distinction habitually drawn a few 
 centuries, or even a few generations ago, between 
 persons of aristocratic descent and all others, we 
 find it, in itself, entirely preposterous. The dis- 
 tinction came to have its quasi-religious impor- 
 tance and therefore its inherent absurdity, only 
 when it had virtually ceased to have any basis in 
 actual fact. Pedigree became more and more im- 
 portant, precisely as original endowment became 
 less and less the decisive factor in men's status ; 
 and it finally became an established superstition in 
 a state of society in which such endowment, 
 whether mental or physical, came to count as 
 nearly for nothing as it ever conceivably can in a 
 state of things at all progressive. All this we can 
 
Equality. 149 
 
 see clearly enough ; and we have as good as 
 discarded the notion of giving a man any moral 
 credit for his parentage — though in those social 
 regions where empty conventions live longest, 
 there is no doubt still a widespread cult of what is 
 called " birth " or '' family." But can we say 
 there is now no element of purely arbitrary and 
 prejudiced discrimination in the attitude of the 
 majority of us towards those whom we describe 
 as not being of our class? If we do not now — 
 being so numerous, and consequently so hazy 
 about our pedigrees — reason that so-and-so is 
 our " inferior " because of the nature of his an- 
 cestry as compared with ours, can we say that we 
 have got to the point of treating those about us 
 either with strict reference to their real characters 
 or capacities, or on terms of entirely equal status? 
 I fear we are still a long way from such a consum- 
 mation. 
 
 Let us take, by way of test, a certain number of 
 the practical relations that subsist, temporarily or 
 permanently, between ordinary people in this 
 country — such as those of master or mistress and 
 domestic servant, buyer and seller on a large scale, 
 buyer and seller on a small scale, artist and artist's 
 customer, employer and workman or workwoman, 
 shopkeeper and shop-assistant, passenger and cab- 
 man or railway servant, barrister or lawyer and 
 clerk, landholder and architect. It is obvious on 
 a moment's thought that there are very wide dif- 
 ferences of tone or spirit, in a general way, be- 
 
150 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 tween people in some of these various positions 
 — that, say, the same person as a rule will as it 
 were change his mental pitch according as he 
 enters into one or other of the relations I have 
 mentioned. No one will deny, for instance, that 
 the average middle-class man is likely to take a 
 different tone towards the artist whom he asks to 
 paint his portrait, from that which he takes to- 
 wards his housemaid ; and that the average lady, 
 similarly, has different modes of address for the 
 counter-server in the shop and the doctor she con- 
 sults about her health. In each case a service is 
 commissioned, rendered, and paid for ; but how 
 different are the various intellectual or spiritual 
 relations ! It may at first sight seem as if the 
 principle of variation were simply that of varia- 
 tion in culture — that tone or spirit of address is 
 adjusted to the intellectual relation between the 
 parties. But this is only a part of the truth, and 
 it tends to hide the rest. The lady, for one thing, 
 can have no knowledge as to the comparative cul- 
 ture of the shopman and the doctor : in any case 
 she would distinguish between the dress-designer 
 and the measurer-out of material, without thinking 
 of the chances as to culture at all. Again, the 
 difference of tone as between wholesale buyer and 
 seller — that is, between principals — and between 
 retail seller and buyer, is clearly not in the main 
 a question of conscious estimate of culture on 
 either side ; nor does the involuntary respect paid, 
 say, to a great or famous physician, as compared 
 
Equality, 151 
 
 with an obscure one, rest on any notion that the 
 famous man is likely to be the better educated. 
 To take yet another case : an able actor will always 
 receive more homage, both in public and in pri- 
 vate, than one who may be much more cultured, 
 but is yet a much worse actor. Where then are 
 we to look for the principle of variation? 
 
 I propose to look for it first under the closest of 
 the normal relations I have named — that of the 
 master or mistress and the domestic servant. 
 Here, undoubtedly, we have the most friction, the 
 most strife, the most complaint, the most diffi- 
 culty. The details are too notorious to need speci- 
 fying : let us therefore take the pleadings on the 
 two sides as heard, and try at once to sum up. 
 Has the average master or mistress made out a 
 clear case of hardship? It has always seemed to 
 me, as a fairly disinterested onlooker, that what- 
 ever may be the faults of the average domestic, 
 there is something in the whole conception of 
 domestic service, as commonly prevailing among 
 us, that puts the average employer philosophically 
 in the wrong. Observe, certain impulses of self- 
 assertion belong in the nature of things to all 
 healthy organisms ; and practical morals and 
 good manners may be said to consist in the orderly 
 and considerate mutual adjustment of these ten- 
 dencies, as among equals before the law, or equals 
 in intercourse, respectively. But between house- 
 ruler and house-servant there is always a 
 presumption of a constant suppression of 
 
162 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 the organic impulse on one side, and a 
 constant parade of it on the other. This 
 tendency is such that a master or mistress who 
 may even be scrupulously — I will not say merely 
 courteous, but, so to speak, equal-minded in deal- 
 ings with tradespeople, will be found to retain the 
 tone of superiority towards the servant at home. 
 The domestic gives her services for her wages just 
 as does the doctor or the artist, just as the gas 
 company or the grocer supply their products ; but 
 somehow it is assumed that she in particular 
 should hold a tone of humility, as of one receiving 
 unmerited favors. All the complaints about dis- 
 respect from servants imply this. Now it is sig- 
 nificant that no such complaints are heard in re- 
 gard to the relations, say, of clerks and their 
 masters, or even those of shopmen and their em- 
 ployers, though here there is certainly plenty of 
 tyranny. The reason is no doubt partly that the 
 constant association within the household involves 
 the constancy of a strain which, in the other cases, 
 subsists only during working hours ; quarrels be- 
 ing thus more likely between mistress and servant 
 than between master and assistant, just as they 
 are unhappily more common between husband and 
 wife than between business partners. But that is 
 not all. There is undoubtedly a special exaction 
 of respect from the home-servant — an exaction 
 such as is not made outside ; and it is abundantly 
 plain that this correlates with the general com- 
 plaint against servants. There is accordingly 
 
Equality. 158 
 
 no comfort for those citizens who sigh for a re- 
 turn to the semi-feudal relations of the past in this 
 matter. The more down-trodden sex has sup- 
 plied, and doubtless will continue to supply, almost 
 the whole of the class which thus, by the very 
 nature of its function, most nearly reproduces the 
 whole relation of master and slave ; but disability 
 of sex and disability of class are alike on the slow 
 but sure way to extinction ; and whoever is in- 
 clined to maintain them by conserving the old 
 fashion of humility in household servitude, is, 
 however unconsciously, obstructing right pro- 
 gress. You cannot have a general spread of edu- 
 cation and of the social spirit without undermining 
 inequality in its last stronghold — the last, because 
 it lies nearest the centre of the social organism — 
 the domestic circle. 
 
 But just as clear as the logical principle, unhap- 
 pily, is the difficulty of the amendment it pre- 
 scribes. Here and there one hears of people who 
 try to treat their servants as moral equals, just as 
 they would treat people of their own class, or rela- 
 tives of their own, who were no better educated 
 than their servants ; but it is not pretended that 
 their path is an easy one. For the spirit of in- 
 equality, in its correlative forms, holds the field on 
 both sides, and the *' inferior '*, so-called, w411 be 
 found to shrink from the life of equality where 
 the ** superior " is willing to realise it. And this, 
 of course, is the real sting of the evil, that in a 
 society theoretically democratic, and therefore in 
 
164 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 theory morally homogeneous, one class still 
 crouches in spirit before another, even while its 
 half-developed instincts of self-assertion are com- 
 ing into play. If the harm and the pathos of this 
 are not perceived, the aspiration for equality can- 
 not be really sympathised with. 
 
 What, let us ask, turning from the single 
 domestic issue to the broad question, what good 
 moral cause is there for the obeisance of any one 
 human being before any other? Surely the 
 general answer of educated people will limit us to 
 the simple recognition of moral or intellectual 
 superiority. Putting aside certain corrupt survi- 
 vals — as, the whole phenomena of royalism ; and 
 certain official conventions — as, the deference paid 
 to judges in court, there is no serious stickling in 
 these days for any theory of class homage. In 
 ordinary society there is no practical translation 
 whatever of the sense of mental inequality into any 
 display of humility. To feel respect there, is not 
 to adopt the tone of humility as we see it in the 
 bearing exacted from the servants. Why, then, 
 should not a similar sense of a common humanity, 
 or of social equivalence, rule over those relations 
 in which there is hardly any greater range of men- 
 tal disparity, but only a difference of relative func- 
 tion? You are always liable, whatever be your 
 class, to the society of people whom you would not 
 select as fitting intellectual companions ; but, they 
 being of your own class, the tone of equality sub- 
 sists. We can all maintain cordial and even lov- 
 
Equality, 156 
 
 ing relations with kinsfolk whose habits of mind 
 are widely different from our own ; and when, as 
 will sometimes happen, we have relatives who are 
 not only uncultured but a trifle vulgar, we still 
 grin and bear it. Why then is it impossible that 
 the same tone, the same recognition of the inde- 
 feasible rights of a personality as such, should 
 enter into all relations between employer and em- 
 ployed, between rich and poor, between mistress 
 and servant, between lady and shop-girl, between 
 gentleman and waiter? The hindrance is not one 
 of culture or of manners : we can get over such 
 difficulties in the society of our own kindred. We 
 must rather look for it in the immemorial tradi- 
 tion, the subtle heredity, of past human conditions, 
 in which the collective life has only with infinite 
 slowness been transformed from a cruel clash of 
 brute force, and a mindless tyranny of naked 
 strength, up through all degrees of class abjection, 
 slavery, serfdom, and servitude, to the sophisti- 
 cated medley of our present world. Mr. Ruskin, 
 in a curious passage, finds a grotesquely materi- 
 alistic cause for the gulf of inequality between the 
 peasant poor and the landholding rich. 
 
 " The star group of the squills, garlic, and onions," he 
 says, *' has always caused me great wonder. I cannot un- 
 derstand why its beauty and serviceableness should have 
 been associated with the rank scent which has been really 
 among the most powerful means of degrading peasant life, 
 and separating it from that of the higher classes."* 
 
 ♦ * The Queen of the Air,' 2nd ed., p. 98. 
 
156 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 I fancy that we to-day, whatever may be our point 
 of view as regards the design theory, are agreed 
 that the secret of class alienation lies a little 
 further inside the skull than the olfactory nerve. 
 
 Perhaps the point that most needs insisting on 
 is the moral obligation on us all to be very patient 
 and very scrupulous in this matter. True altruism 
 means not merely a negative but also a positive 
 attitude. It involves the bearing of burdens and 
 the assumption of disagreeable functions. Not a 
 few of us must have had a certain sense of chill 
 a year or two ago in reading the reprint of a short 
 newspaper essay written long before by George 
 Eliot, in which the great novelist, after wittily re- 
 presenting the difficulties and trials of an attempt 
 to teach servants to do the right thing intelli- 
 gently and of their own will, comes to the conclu- 
 sion that it is best not to appeal to their reason at 
 all, but simply to give your orders and see that 
 they are attended to. You do not attempt, said the 
 essayist, to guide your child by appeals to his 
 reason : that would be to make him a monster, 
 without reverence, without affections ; and just so 
 it is with the average domestic. The logic of the 
 analogy is not very clear, but here are the 
 essayist's words of summing-up : 
 
 "Wise masters and mistresses will not argue with their 
 servants, will not give them reasons, will not consult them. 
 A mild yet firm authority, which rigorously demands that 
 certain things be done without urging motives or entering 
 into explanations, is both preferred by the servants them- 
 selves, and is the best means of educating them into any 
 
Equality. 157 
 
 improvement of their methods and habits. Authority and 
 tradition are the chief, almost the only safe guides of the 
 uninstructed — are the chief means of developing the crude 
 mind, whether childish or adult." 
 
 And so on. The note is disconcerting, coming- from 
 such a quarter. But I venture to say to you that 
 not merely is the logic of that counsel unsound but 
 the ethic of the whole is on the wrong line. How, 
 let us ask ourselves, is the crude adult mind ever 
 to rise above crudity if it is to be treated as a 
 mere machine? Your child's mind will change 
 of itself, and will begin one day to reason in spite 
 of you : the servant's mind, in the terms of the 
 case, is to be conserved in all its imperfections. 
 Now, this is only the application to the domestic 
 problem of the strong-man or autocrat theory of 
 government ; which proceeds on the assumption 
 that the majority of people are incurably unwise, 
 and therefore unfit to govern themselves ; and 
 that accordingly a strong despot is the proper 
 thing for us. And some people call that doctrine 
 practical. Well, we may be mostly unwise ; but 
 then our autocratic theorist shares in the inheri- 
 tance. What is to be said of the practicality of 
 a system which, finding unwisdom to begin with, 
 goes about to deepen and perpetuate it? Take 
 the case of the paternal autocracy of Cromwell, a 
 ruler not only strong but in a measure enlightened 
 and sagacious in his executive practice. What 
 was the total effect of his assumption of all the 
 functions of government? The reduction of the 
 English nation from that state of moral vigor in 
 
158 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 which it could wage the revolutionary war, to that 
 in which it could of its own free will grovel before 
 Charles the Second and place his foot on its neck. 
 So true is it that men must work their own salva- 
 tion, and that he who seeks to take in his hands 
 the destiny of his fellows may be unknowingly a 
 curse to them in the very degree of his capacity 
 to overrule their wills, as he thinks, for their own 
 good. 
 
 But the matter has wider bearings still. Once 
 take your stand on the abstract principle of a 
 benevolent despotism, and you will not stop with 
 dictating to your servants, to say nothing of pro- 
 moting unconstitutional government. See how 
 our judicial authority applies the same principle to 
 the first of all domestic relations, that of husband 
 and wife. Where there is a real inequality to 
 start with, he argues, you should recognise in- 
 equality of rights ; and he goes on to put the case 
 of the necessity, in married life, of deciding on a 
 great many questions in practice. On a thousand 
 such questions, he says, 
 
 "The wisest and the most affectionate people might 
 arrive at opposite conclusions. What is to be done in 
 such a case? for something must be done. I say the wife 
 ought to give way. She ought to obey her husband, and 
 carry out the view at which he deliberately arrives, just as 
 when the captain gives the word to cut away the masts, 
 the lieutenant carries out his orders at once, though he 
 may be a better seaman and may disapprove them. I 
 also say that to regard this as a humiliation, as a wrong, 
 as an evil in itself, is a mark not of spirit and courage, 
 but of a base, unworthy, mutinous disposition—a dis- 
 position utterly subversive of all that is most worth hav- 
 
Equality. 159 
 
 ing in life. The tacit assumption involved in it is that it 
 is a degradation ever to give up one's own will to the will 
 of another, and to me this appears the root of all evil, the 
 negation of that which renders any combined efforts pos- 
 sible." 
 
 Before we take up the moral issue, just let us note 
 for a moment here how naively a legal mind can 
 transcend its habit of logic when in the full glow 
 of a prejudice. It is most pernicious, we are told, 
 to insist on always having our own way ; ergo, in 
 married life the man must always have his. It is 
 base and unworthy to refuse ever to give in ; 
 therefore a husband must never give in. Such 
 harmonies are to be found in legal minds. But 
 the logical question, however entertaining it may 
 thus become, is only the shell of the matter. The 
 question of the relations of personality between 
 men and women in married life, I would here say, 
 is one the essentials of which the legal mind is 
 highly capable of missing : it takes us down to 
 spiritual principles which even the idealistic mind 
 — as we have seen in the case of George Eliot — 
 cannot always be trusted to perceive. It is no idle 
 paradox to say that the woman's question may 
 just as truly be called the man's question : how 
 truly, those can perhaps best understand who will 
 take the trouble to trace the tedium vitce and the 
 other forces of dissolution in the societies of 
 ancient Greece and Rome, with their very clearly 
 defined relations between the sexes ; and then to 
 analyse the elements of modern pessimism, 
 whether of the every-day order or the philosophic. 
 
160 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 But you who have been taught by Moncure Con- 
 way* cannot be backward in the understanding of 
 this matter ; and in any case I would not pre- 
 sume to offer you a body of doctrine on such a 
 topic. I will just say, as regarding our theme of 
 equality, that to make conjugal co-operation a 
 matter of the giving and taking of orders, in which 
 the one side is to sacrifice its wishes always and 
 the other side never, is just to reduce the whole 
 relation to the lowest moral basis on which it can 
 possibly stand. No two people can live such a 
 life without deteriorating or at best stagnating : 
 they are off the line of moral evolution. And if 
 you can see this, you will see that just the same 
 kind of deterioration — though doubtless in a less 
 degree — is involved in all habitual relations of en- 
 tirely arbitrary command and spiritless obedience. 
 Let us not shrink from asserting this, in face of 
 those practical exigencies which seem most abso- 
 lutely to exclude our principle. The fact, so much 
 harped on, that there can be no equality, in any 
 sense, in an army, is simply one more argument 
 against armies. It is indeed a most encouraging 
 thought that the progress of real democratic feel- 
 ing, in such a society as that of modern Europe, 
 tends to eliminate war, not only by making men 
 averse to mutual slaughter, but by making them 
 progressively unfit for the mechanical submission 
 that the military life implies. It is not that will- 
 
 * Said on the platform of South Place Institute. 
 
Equality. 161 
 
 ing obedience or willing- compromise is repulsive 
 to a healthy mind. Justice Stephen is quite right 
 so far. It is that a constant attitude of unques- 
 tioning submission, with the very idea of indepen- 
 dent judgment excluded, is perceptibly degrading 
 to anyone capable of such judgment — degrading, 
 that is, at the very best, inasmuch as it stunts the 
 whole growth of the intelligence which resignedly 
 submits to it. And just as education and other 
 good things become diffused among us, there must 
 assuredly take place a transformation of the old 
 system of mere drill and discipline in all the or- 
 ganisations in which many men work together. 
 You will not have anarchy ; but you will have 
 elasticity, else your political progress halts on one 
 foot. You cannot have the ideal of aq army per- 
 manently imposed on the civic machinery of an 
 evolving society. 
 
 To see the spiritual gain involved in equality, 
 we have but to turn to the society of the United 
 States and note the differences between it and our 
 own. For those of us who have not seen it with 
 our eyes there is a vivid and valuable species of 
 report in the whole body of American fiction, in so 
 far as it deals with home life, and is not concerned 
 to sketch the life of Europe. Here, and similarly 
 in the American plays, the tone of equality strikes 
 one constantly, and, I think, always pleasantly. 
 That tone of mutual recognition which we catch in 
 cases where with us the relation is merely servile 
 — how taking it is, how suggestive of cheerfulness 
 
162 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 and a forward motion of things. There, too, 
 there is a servant problem, but how much nearer 
 they seem to a democratic solution than we ! It 
 is difficult to say where the attraction precisely 
 lies, but somehow there seems to be a gain of 
 moral sunshine in respect of the sum total of those 
 forms of class life which are there independent and 
 self-respecting, while here they strike the note of 
 subjection and humility. When you read in Mr. 
 Howells of a lumberman, whose life is one of 
 wandering and toil, but who, being given to ran- 
 dom reading, will talk familiarly with an educated 
 man about '* old Arnold '' and " old Spencer *' and 
 '* old Huxley '* ; who, as the novelist says, is 
 through life buoyed up by a few wildly interpreted 
 maxims of Emerson, and retains always the same 
 tone of ** gross and ridiculous optimism " — this 
 picture has its comic side, but has it not also one 
 full of brightness and healthy significance? It 
 seems to me that all that element of self-confidence 
 and equal-mindedness which we note in all grades 
 of American life as compared with our own, what- 
 ever drawbacks it may carry in the way of ignorant 
 conceit, is so much substitution of social light for 
 social gloom. There may be other evils, but this 
 surely is a gain. Sir James Stephen, on whom 
 we can always place entire reliance as devil's ad- 
 vocate in these matters, observes that it is to be 
 questioned 
 
 " whether the enormous development of equality in 
 America, the rapid production of an immense multitude of 
 
Equality. 163 
 
 commonplace, self-satisfied, and essentially slight people, 
 is an exploit which the whole world need fall down and 
 worship **. 
 
 But our genial jurist is again misconceiving the 
 problem. It is not the production of self-satisfied, 
 commonplace people that is the alleged gain — 
 we in England, by the way, may compete with 
 confidence in these matters — but the production of 
 these self-satisfied multitudes where other coun- 
 tries, such as our own, produce legions that can 
 never attain material self-satisfaction, or do so 
 only on the sorriest pretexts. In short, America 
 manufactures happiness where we produce abjec- 
 tion and poverty of soul ; and about the expedi- 
 ency of producing these last there is no question at 
 all. As for the alleged '* slightness '* of the 
 people who grow up under the regime of equality — 
 well, we are all rather poor creatures at best ; 
 and in any case it is not at all clear that the 
 special products of inequality among us, whether 
 upper-class or lower, have even the saving grace 
 cf solidity. As for the moral aspect of the matter, 
 it is extremely hard to see where our advantage 
 lies. What are we to infer of the social condition 
 of a country where there is a " British Ladies' 
 Female Emigration Society " — where the ''ladies*' 
 subscribe to send the '* females " abroad? 
 I find that it is still a perfectly common 
 thing, both in Presbyterian Scotland and in 
 Episcopalian England, for clergymen to hold 
 separate Bible or confirmation-classes for ' ' young 
 
 M 2 
 
164 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 ladies '* and ** young women **, this sort of thing" 
 surviving under the very auspices of fraternal 
 Christianity. 
 
 Do not suppose, from any of these trifling data, 
 that this is after all only a small question of 
 manners and passing conventions. The future of 
 every nation is bound up in the resolution it takes 
 as to this problem. Indeed, we might say that 
 only those States which come to the sound con- 
 clusion will have any long national future at all. 
 The human struggle for survival, in the time to 
 come, is going to mean a competition in all kinds 
 of fitness to live ; and my burden to-day is that 
 the sense of personal equality is one of the plainest 
 conditions of satisfactory life. And round this 
 centre will group themselves many contests of 
 ideas — the contests on behalf of the freedom of 
 women, of children, of the workers, of the lower 
 races, of the masses of the higher races. You will 
 find that a general connection runs through the 
 forms of opinion on these matters ; and you will 
 find further, what is very significant, that back- 
 ward-pointing opinion on more abstract questions 
 tends to join itself to reactionary opinion on these 
 several topics. It is worth noting that Carlyle, in 
 his latter years the strenuous theocratic prophet of 
 despotism, and the foe of all schemes of advance- 
 ment, was of opinion in his younger days, when he 
 was something of a rationalist, and believed in 
 national education, that conquering heroes were a 
 class of people the world could do very well with- 
 
Eqitality, 165 
 
 out.^ In those days, and perhaps later, he taught 
 that ** the true Shekinah is man *'. But what has 
 become of the Shekinah in the later doctrine of 
 political subjection and the vileness of mankind? 
 Let us take up his discarded creed : man is the 
 highest thing we know, and to view him as such 
 is to deplore every form of human degradation, 
 every stain of indignity on a human personality, 
 which reason and experience tell us we might 
 efface. Where Carlyle, with his anti-fraternal 
 view of things, grew out of his dislike of despotism 
 into a boundless devotion to it, Voltaire, with his 
 ever-deepening human sympathies, grew out of 
 his early liking for absolutism! into a ripe convic- 
 tion that that had been a mistaken reading of the 
 book of history. 
 
 Apropos of Carlyle *s anti-humanism, there has 
 been broached, in passionate contradiction of him, 
 a doctrine which seems to carry the idea of 
 equality to its furthest spiritual bounds — the doc- 
 trine laid down, namely, by the late Mr. Henry 
 James, senior, in his remarkable paper on Car- 
 lyle,! that just as economic science prescribes for 
 Europe the utilisation of its enormous volume of 
 waste matter, so immensely valuable, as a means 
 to the physical regeneration of its soil, so the moral 
 regeneration of the race demands the absorption 
 into its life of all its outcasts, the care of whom 
 
 * * Essay on Burns,' People's Ed., p. 6. 
 tSee the Extracts in Buckle, 3-voi. ed., ii, 295. 
 tin the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1881. 
 
166 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 will mean its moral salvation. From my stand- 
 point, I cannot accept the principle so put, but it 
 seems to me to point to a truth. The absorption 
 of any element of weakness or blemish into the 
 general life cannot well fail to mean the presence 
 of that weakness in the new combination ; but it 
 remains true that until society seeks to raise its 
 pariahs, the whole upshot of human life will prove 
 a sad subject for reflection. And while we shall 
 do well to allow largely for those forces of destruc- 
 tion and disease which belong to moral affairs as 
 to all others, we shall find that that instinct of 
 self-preservation which underlies all life is curi- 
 ously tenacious of existence even in the sphere of 
 what we may call morbid morals. When, a year 
 or two ago, I gave some time to the investigation 
 of slum life in a large town, hardly anything — not 
 even the grime and the ignominy — impressed me 
 more than the extent to which moral gradations 
 were recognised among those ill-starred multi- 
 tudes. Scandal was as rife among them as in the 
 best society. The woman who was a drunkard 
 and a pilferer, and worse, looked down from a 
 certain moral elevation on her neighbour who had 
 lost all of her nine children and was suspected of 
 having shortened their lives by her violence. 
 Where all true decency was dead, there was still 
 a strenuously-drawn line between ill-fame that was 
 notorious and that which was only a matter of tacit 
 recognition. A block peopled by known ex-con- 
 victs was let at distinctly lower rents than the 
 
Equality, 167 
 
 average ; though the standard of cleanliness and 
 order was found to be higher. Reviewing it al], 
 I remembered that all successful criminal manage- 
 ment had proceeded on the plan of appealing to 
 the germs of self-respect and good feeling in the 
 subject ; and I could not but recognise that here, 
 under the most pitiless and most decisive of all the 
 caste divisions of society, the spirit of individual 
 self-assertion, which is the stuif of spiritual 
 equality, had a strange vitality, carrying even a 
 certain dark promise of better things to come. 
 
 I would not, however, be thought to stake the 
 whole gospel of equality on a moral scheme which 
 amounts to an inculcation of the most advanced 
 fraternity ; rather I contend that the ideal of 
 equality is the more practical of the two, being 
 already visibly well on the way to realisation in 
 some parts of the world. You may have the spirit 
 of equality even in strife, and the times of strife 
 are still with us. And while I disclaim the office 
 of prescribing machinery, I venture to think that 
 the lines of the progress to be made are not hard 
 to see. Whatsoever you do in the spirit of re- 
 spect for the personalities of all with whom you 
 come into contact, and in prevention of any humili- 
 ation of a fellow creature, that makes for equality, 
 and so for happiness. And this spirit excludes all 
 inequality of tone and temper ; beginning with 
 the home circle and abolishing that primeval sub- 
 jection of the woman-child to the man-child — the 
 sister to the brother — which so strangely survives 
 
168 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 to-day in so many English households ; proceed- 
 ing at the same time to give the wife equality with 
 her husband, and therefore companionship with 
 her sons, as our neighbours across the Channel 
 have contrived to do with all their miscarriages ; 
 going on through the more remote relations of life 
 to the political and the international, till we are 
 really a self-governing people within our bounds, 
 and shall not only do justly by all other peoples, 
 strong or weak, great or low, but shall have be- 
 come incapable of the arrogance of imputing 
 special follies and vices to other nations, in the 
 fashion which even our judicial minds affect, as if 
 we had no follies and vices of our own. In the 
 immediate field of practical politics the bearing of 
 the principle is plain enough. Instead of wonder- 
 ing how the nation is to get on without an all- 
 powerful political leader, is it not time that, while 
 fully recognising the still obvious need for organi- 
 sation, parties should begin to think of acting by 
 intelligent accord, giving to no man the keeping 
 of the consciences of their fellows? An American 
 poet has of late years given to his countrymen the 
 boldest counsel that can well be given by a think- 
 ing man: " Resist much, obey little " ; and ex- 
 treme as that may sound, it will be found, I think, 
 to be more truly practical and more philosophic 
 at bottom that the contrary doctrine of our legal 
 guide, who teaches that the fifth commandment 
 was a better precept for a nation's life than any 
 maxim of democracy. As to this, let that nation 
 
Equality. 169 
 
 now speak which claims first to have received the 
 fifth commandment. The spirit of man to-day is 
 fain to think it has got hold of higher and deeper 
 moral laws than that, and in the new faith sets up 
 for itself a new ideal— the cultus of the future as 
 against the cultus of the past. Its promised land 
 is to be watered with no human blood, though it 
 is even harder to reach than the old, and may for 
 many a day and generation seem to recede as we 
 strain towards it : it is truly a land that is very far 
 off. But the way thither is not through the de- 
 sert ; rather it lies through ** orient lands of 
 hope *', which already yield a foretaste of the fruits 
 and flowers of the realm beyond. 
 
EMOTION IN HISTORY. 
 
 A GLANCE INTO THE SPRINGS OF 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 (1886.) 
 
 The great questions which divide philosophers, it 
 has been truly said, are not, as common-sense 
 people are apt to suppose, mere artificial disputes 
 engendered by rival systems, but are rather, in 
 the main, extensions into abstract and technical 
 terms of differences which spring up among every- 
 day thinkers, on every-day occasions, and which, 
 to say truth, are as a rule discussed on such occa- 
 sions with no more and no less decisive result than 
 attends most philosophic encounters. A few pro- 
 minent issues will sufficiently illustrate the point. 
 The problem of the existence of **a God*' remains 
 the last, as it is one of the first, that forces itself 
 on the human mind in any stage of its develop- 
 ment. Our most encyclopaedic philosopher, Mr. 
 Spencer, after reviewing all the phases of thought 
 known to him, from the highest to the lowest, 
 decides that where primeval man began by surmis- 
 ing a power or powers behind the actual things 
 around ; and where the ordinary man to-day un- 
 hesitatingly accepts the doctrine of the existence 
 of such a power, the most philosophic mind of all 
 will admit the existence of an infinite mystery 3^ 
 ( 170 ) 
 
Emotion in History, 171 
 
 never to be solved, but, nevertheless, always to be 
 faced and never to be ignored, by the man of the 
 future. And so with the problem of free will. The 
 philosophers carry that to further lengths, and 
 into subtler analyses, than do the common-sense 
 people who discuss in simple language, and short 
 sentences, the question whether a certain man's 
 bad actions are to be blamed as deliberately 
 wrong, as breaches of a known moral law, or 
 are to be palliated as the results of inherited 
 character, of bad education, and of untoward 
 circumstances. 
 
 And just so it is with the vexed question I have 
 pointed at in the title of this discourse. Nothing 
 is more common in ordinary talk than an inquiry 
 as to whether such a one is lacking in qualities of 
 the heart or of the head ; and whether, that being 
 ascertained, the inferior heart or the inferior head 
 does the more harm, or is the more to be objected 
 to. Probably the more frequent verdict is that 
 the person whose ** heart is in the right place ", as 
 the phrase goes, is a more estimable character 
 than the other whose heart is not all that could be 
 desired, even if that other does less real harm in 
 the world. Good people naturally tend to appeal 
 to what they call good feeling, and have a leaning 
 to the motto *' love is lord of all *'. Yet it hap- 
 pens every now and then that one of these good 
 people is acutely impressed by the truth that ' ' evil 
 is wrought by want of thought as well as want of 
 heart **, and then we find them almost inclined to 
 
172 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 think that want of thought is the true name for 
 that want of consideration for others which they 
 had termed want of heart. 
 
 A great novelist, deeply convinced of the close 
 connection between self-criticism and right action, 
 has illustrated her view in her fictions, with such 
 results that many people are brought to take per- 
 haps a severer view of the conduct of such a 
 character as Arthur Donnithorne in *Adam Bede ', 
 not at all what we call a heartless type, than of 
 such a character as Rosamond Vincy in ' Middle- 
 march \ to whom the word applies with admitted 
 accuracy. Well, this difference of view as to the 
 nature and relative importance of the springs of 
 conduct is substantially reproduced in the disagree- 
 ments of great thinkers, under whose formulas 
 whole schools range themselves. In the philo- 
 sophy of history we find it strenuously disputed 
 whether it is feeling or idea, knowledge or senti- 
 ment, emotion or reason, that impels or controls 
 the progress of society, and it must be confessed 
 that the philosophers are about as capable as the 
 rest of us of changing their point of view, and even 
 of holding the two views alternately or indiscrimi- 
 nately. This point is, in fact, the crux of the 
 philosophy of history, so far as that has any gene- 
 ral practical interest. But I do not propose either 
 to impeach or to invoke the authority of any of 
 the great names of philosophy in this purely prac- 
 tical enquiry. It is a less presumptuous and a 
 more hopeful course to try to look into the ques- 
 
Emotion in History. 178 
 
 tlon in those phases in which it naturally presents 
 itself in actual life, than to undertake to set the 
 philosophers right all round ; and if we still go 
 astray, at least we shall have fatigued ourselves 
 a little the less in the process. 
 
 Let us see, as plainly as may be, what our pro- 
 blem is. It is. Whether the ruling force in his- 
 toric progress, practically speaking, is opinion, as 
 fixed by processes of reasoning, or the, so-to- 
 speak, elemental influence of the affections — in the 
 sense of sympathies and aversions, desires and 
 loves and hates. Are great historic changes the 
 result of ideas deduced from earlier ideas ; or are 
 they rather the outcome of, as it were, spontane- 
 ous tides of feeling, which the ideas serve only 
 to justify and express? Are political crises, as 
 Mr. Spencer puts it, the effects of ** moral an- 
 tagonisms*' ; or are they produced by conflicting 
 theories and convictions? Let us, instead of 
 lingering at the outset over our words, and striv- 
 ing for definitions, put our case in terms of known 
 historical events, and see if we can grasp its ele- 
 ments in that form. 
 
 Any period will serve us. Take first the in- 
 stance of the rise and consummation of the an- 
 tagonism to slavery in the United States, as being 
 a historical episode to which we are near enough 
 in sympathy and in acquaintance with details, and 
 from which we are yet far enough removed to 
 view it as a whole and in true perspective. Was 
 that important occurrence the outcome of a de- 
 
174 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 monstration of the illegitimacy of slavery in a de- 
 mocratic country, or of its demoralising effect on 
 all concerned ; or was it rather the expression of 
 an uprising of humane emotion — of sheer brotherly 
 love? Were people persuaded and convinced that 
 slavery was wrong ; or did they set out by a 
 spontaneous aversion to it? There is plenty to be 
 said on both sides. It would hardly do, on the 
 one hand, to say that the abolitionists were all 
 good reasoners, and their opponents the reverse, 
 or, on the other hand, that only inhumane people 
 upheld or tolerated the institution. The various 
 cases of Channing, of Lincoln, and of Hawthorne, 
 should give us pause on that head. Again, we 
 can see that there was nothing new in the argu- 
 ments against slavery ; and they were certainly 
 very simple. Why was it that at first every pul- 
 pit in the United States was in favor of the slave- 
 owners, all justifying slavery by passages in the 
 Bible ; while ultimately, in the North at least, the 
 clerical attitude almost entirely changed? Had 
 the ministers simply come to see that they had mis- 
 understood the Bible? Both sides had appealed 
 to the Bible: did the Bible settle it? It seems 
 hardly possible to decide that it did ; but if we 
 do not so decide, neither can we with confidence 
 say that people's minds were changed by reason- 
 ing ; for the only process of reasoning traceable 
 in many cases seems to have consisted in showing 
 that cruelty was being inflicted, and appealing to 
 a dislike of cruelty assumed to exist in the general 
 
Emotion in History. 175 
 
 mind ; which is something like saying that it was 
 an emotion that did the work. 
 
 Take next the case of the French Revolution, 
 variously described as the outcome of an emotional 
 contagion and of certain political teachings. One 
 has only to look into these matters in a dispas- 
 sionate spirit to begin to suspect that the difficulty 
 dealt with is one we ourselves have created in 
 making the distinction with which we set out. 
 What is it, wx find ourselves asking — what is it 
 that distinguishes emotional action from reasoned 
 action? Rousseau, we are told, appealed to men's 
 emotions. But how did he do it? Did he not do 
 it by laying down certain propositions of an intel- 
 lectual nature, such as that all men were born 
 free, and that inequality was the great source of 
 misery? To say such things is to state ideas, to 
 argue, to appeal to a certain sense of logical 
 sequence, limited it is true, but still recognisable 
 as an intellectual function, in the ordinary sense of 
 the term. So that, to come to the point, we begin 
 to perceive a state of emotion to be a natural 
 sequence or concomitant, in certain cases, of a 
 mental process ; and, what is still more to the 
 purpose, we begin to perceive that the emotion 
 cannot very well be called into play except through 
 some appeal to the judgment. 
 
 There is, perhaps, an equal chance that this 
 kind of analysis may seem on the one hand a need- 
 less dissection, and on the other a too facile dis- 
 missal of a problem that is very real for many. 
 
176 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 For, remember, this distinction between reason 
 and emotion, this treatment of them as two inde- 
 pendent influences, so to speak, is one of the com- 
 monest theories of human nature, being- implied 
 alike in our private discussions, in our public pro- 
 paganda, and in the distinct teachings of rival 
 philosophies. Hear this utterance of Bentham in 
 his young days,* in regard to the jurist Black- 
 stone : ** For indeed such an ungenerous antipathy 
 [ue.y Blackstone's antipathy to political and legal 
 reform] seemed of itself enough to promise a 
 general vein of obscure and crooked reasoning, 
 from whence no clear and sterling knowledge could 
 be derived ; so intimate is the connection between 
 some of the gifts of the understanding, and some 
 of the affections of the heart. ' * Here is the father 
 of utilitarianism himself, whom Carlyle has de- 
 nounced as a mere logic-mill, devoid of living emo- 
 tion, actually urging that a certain human-kind- 
 ness, or enthusiasm for the general good, is the 
 necessary condition not only of helpful action, but 
 even of right reasoning and accurate perception. 
 Bentham is indeed only one of many cases of 
 character which, when we look into them, strongly 
 suggest the fallibility of those processes by which 
 we infer a man to have been warm-hearted or the 
 reverse. When the * Life and Letters of Macau- 
 lay * appeared there was a sincere surprise over 
 the revelation that the man who had been gener- 
 
 * See his * Fragment on Government ', 1776. 
 
Emotion in History. 177 
 
 ally regarded as a brilliant partisan writer, almost 
 devoid of the deeper emotions, and by not a few 
 as a sort of hard-mouthed sophist, utterly lacking 
 in sweetness and light, was in private life full of 
 the tenderest family devotion, so deeply attached 
 to his sisters that he never seemed to want to 
 marry, and a very fountain of affection and good- 
 ness to them and theirs his whole life long. So 
 deeply rooted, indeed, had become the notion that 
 Macaulay was a mere intellectual phenomenon, 
 that the writer of one sketch of him* has declared 
 he *' was a born citadin^ and cared for nature 
 hardly at all ", though Macaulay has told how 
 once piece of scenery in the Neilgherries moved 
 him almost to tears ;t the inaccuracy being no 
 doubt the result of the preconceived opinion. His- 
 tory and biography are full of these apparent para- 
 doxes. When, some fifty years ago, it was pro- 
 posed to run the projected railway to Brighton 
 through a piece of lovely scenery which would be 
 destroyed by the construction, who among Eng- 
 lish literary men was it that alone publicly pro- 
 tested and appealed against the scheme? John 
 Stuart Mill, the utilitarian, supposed by many of 
 his discerning contemporaries to advocate the con- 
 stant subordination of the beautiful to the vul- 
 garly useful, and to reduce all life to a sordid 
 balancing of material gains and losses. The world 
 
 *J. Cotter Morison, * Macaulay,' p. 113. 
 t Trevelyan's ' Life ', ch. vi. 
 
178 Essays in Ethics* 
 
 truly plays fantastic tricks in its general judg- 
 ments — those crystallisations of the *' harebrained 
 chatter of irresponsible frivolity '' into dicta which 
 pass as indisputable universal truth. 
 
 It is the art of prudence, then — to put it no more 
 forcibly — to look with doubt on the conventional 
 separation between the emotional and the rational 
 in character ; and, by consequence, to doubt the 
 independence of the two influences in historic 
 action. There is scarcely an argument in the case 
 for either that cannot be, and is not, turned 
 against itself. Buckle teaches us — in a workj 
 which no real student of history can look on with- 
 out respect, and which has, I venture to say, much 
 more real stamina of sound induction in it than 
 some recent ready-writers give it credit for — that 
 powerful thinker reasons, on a survey of the move- 
 ment of modern civilisation, that moral progress, 
 so far as there is any, is purely and simply a result 
 of increasing knowledge of the laws of nature, the 
 increasing thoughtfulness which such knowledge 
 brings giving rise directly to moderation of primi- 
 tive passion and clearer perception of the claims of 
 others, and indirectly furthering the same ends by 
 promoting the arts. The main principles of inter- 
 national and private morality, says Buckle, were 
 as well known and as commonly enunciated two 
 thousand years ago as now. That wars of 
 
 t ' Introduction to the History of Civilisation in Eng- 
 land,' ch. iv. 
 
Emotion in History, 179 
 
 aggression are wrong, that we should do as we 
 would be done by — these were moral common- 
 places then as now : the difference is that in the 
 interval a whole world of intellectual and material 
 influences has come into play, and we have become 
 in that way different creatures. Buckle indeed 
 does say that morality is really unprogressive, that 
 the proportion between well-meaning people and 
 ill-meaning people remains much the same, and 
 that the social change consists in our fuller know- 
 ledge preventing us from committing such atro- 
 cities as burning heretics, and so forth. And, 
 armed with testimony as he usually is, the his- 
 torian can cite three respectable names on his side 
 — Mackintosh, who said that " morality makes no 
 discoveries ' ' ; Condorcet, who declared that ' ' the 
 morality of all nations has been the same '* ; and 
 Kant, who laid it down that *' in moral philosophy 
 we have got no further than the ancients ". 
 
 But just here come in the advocates of the emo- 
 tional view, who say : '' Quite so. The ancients 
 knew the logic of morality as well as the moderns ; 
 but they lacked the sympathy, the emotion for jus- 
 tice, the passion for others' well-being, which 
 makes modern life superior." On this, to be quite 
 frank, one has some misgivings. Is our inter- 
 national morality, one asks, so much better than 
 that of the ancients? When we contemplate the 
 policy of Caesar and Alexander we seem at first to 
 be in a different moral environment ; but w^hen we 
 recall our own exploits in India, Africa, America, 
 
 1 
 
180 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 in Afghanistan, in Zululand, in Egypt, and in 
 Burmah, the difference does not appear quite so 
 clear. The truth is that our ethics, while they 
 have improved within the limits of the nation, are 
 almost purely barbarous as concerns our relations 
 with uncivilised States, that is to say, with those 
 States which we can oppress with irr^.-.nity. It is 
 indeed to be hoped — otherwise our morality has 
 a rather dreary outlook — that the practice of inter- 
 national burglary will ere long be universally dis- 
 credited, and that national exultation over a battue 
 campaign against ill-armed savages will become 
 as impossible in Europe as a revival of the gladia- 
 torial shows of Rome ;* but that we are still bar- 
 barians in that regard is proved year after year by 
 brutalising pictures of scenes of carnage in our 
 illustrated Press. 
 
 Still, let us acknowledge that we are improving 
 at home. If we make war on Egypt and annex 
 Burmah, shooting as rebels those who defend their 
 country as against us, at least we put down prize- 
 fighting in England. It is hardly possible not to 
 speak satirically of these things, and yet, gro- 
 tesque as the contrasts are, the fact is indisputable 
 that the moral sense is developing among us. And 
 if we compare the inner life of ancient Rome with 
 our own we may take heart and hope. Those 
 atrocious women of the Empire, who could take 
 
 * This was written in 1886. We have had since the na- 
 tional exultation over the battue campaign against the 
 Soudanese, and the infamous war in South Africa. 
 
Emotion in History, 181 
 
 satisfaction in having slaves flogg-ed to death in 
 their presence, and who could clamorously insist 
 that the vanquished gladiator should be stabbed to 
 the heart by his comrade antagonist — these wo- 
 men, and the women of Juvenal, are not to be 
 matched, happily, among the mothers of our 
 time. And when we think of the mere diabolism 
 of the morals of such beings — nay, when we think 
 of the normal and universal insensibility to scenes 
 of outrage not only among the ancients but in the 
 middle ages, it does seem as if what was wanting 
 to our forefathers was really, as the emotionalists 
 say, the power of feeling, the simple elemental 
 sense of compassion and fellow-creatureship which 
 Mahomet, in a moment of emotion, declared to be 
 one of the best gifts of Allah to men. And yet 
 even here we shall find, I think, if we study it out, 
 that the emotional explanation is not the final one. 
 Let us carry ourselves in imagination to a 
 famous and impressive scene in medieval history, 
 that of the abdication of his imperial functions by 
 Charles the Fifth at Brussels in 1555, in favor of 
 his son Philip — the scene which is so vividly re- 
 produced for us by Mr. Motley.^ The old Em- 
 peror, we are told in the dispatch of the English 
 envoy, who was present, '* begged the forgive- 
 ness of his subjects if he had ever unwittingly 
 omitted the performance of any of his duties to- 
 wards them. And here he broke into a weeping, 
 
 * ' Rise of the Dutch Republic,' Pt. I, oh. i. 
 
182 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 whereunto, besides the dolefulness of the matter, 
 I think, he was moche provoked by seeing the 
 whole company to do the lyke before ; there beyng 
 in myne opinion not one man in the whole assem- 
 blie, stranger or another, that dewring the time of 
 a good piece of his oration poured not out as abun- 
 dantly teares, some more, some lesse. And yet 
 he prayed them to bear with his imperfections, 
 proceeding of his sickly age, and of the mention- 
 ing of so tender a matter as the departing from 
 such a sort of dere and loving subjects/' And 
 there is abundant further testimony to the same 
 effect. *'And yet," asks Mr. Motley, half in 
 amazement, half in indignation, *' what was the 
 Emperor Charles to the inhabitants of the Nether- 
 lands that they should weep for him? His con- 
 duct towards them during his whole career had 
 
 been one of unmitigated oppression The 
 
 interests of the Netherlands had never been even 
 a secondary consideration with their master. He 
 had fulfilled no duty towards them. He had re- 
 garded them merely as a treasury upon which to 
 draw ; while the sums which he extorted were 
 spent upon ceaseless and senseless wars, which 
 were of no more interest to them than if they had 
 been waged in another planet. " He had cut down 
 their liberties ; he had inflicted bloody and crush- 
 ing penalties on the city of Ghent for simply assert- 
 ing its ancient rights to self-taxation. All un- 
 deniably true, and yet who doubts that the display 
 of emotion both by the cruel old king and the 
 
Emotion in History. 183 
 
 people of the Netherlands was, as Mr. Motley tells 
 us, perfectly sincere? 
 
 That was genuine emotion, assuredly ; and such 
 facile emotion, impossible now to us, was possible 
 in those days to men and women whom in other 
 respects we perceive to have been barbarously 
 callous. Excessive sympathetic emotion is not 
 only not incompatible with a comparatively primi- 
 tive development of moral sensibility, but actually 
 correlates naturally with that. And if we go back 
 to the case of the Romans, with their very women 
 capable of gross cruelty, we shall on impartial re- 
 consideration find that we are in presence not of 
 mere sterility of emotional quality, but rather of a 
 monstrous and deadly overgrowth of the emotional 
 nature, a frightful perversion of it, fatal to the sub- 
 ject as well as the victims, a sure portent of the 
 ruin of the society in which it was possible. Look 
 at the matter rightly and you will see that these 
 ferocious appetites were of the very stuff of emo- 
 tion, were really the expression of a profound 
 craving for excitement, bred in a brutal and cor- 
 rupt society, and not to be allayed by any save 
 brutal methods. Where the idle English woman 
 of fashion, with her gentle nurture and her deli- 
 cate nerves, seeks her emotional nutriment in 
 society, in gaiety, in spectacle, in the levee, at the 
 race-course, at the theatre, in the novel, and in 
 the fashionable church, the patrician woman of 
 imperial Rome, with her more animal nature, her 
 profounder enrnay and her wilder unrest, craved a 
 
184 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 far fiercer thrill, a tigerish joy. And as with the 
 woman, so with the man ; for, indeed, what is it 
 but a spontaneous emotion that makes us more 
 aghast at cruelty in the Roman woman than in the 
 Roman man? 
 
 Take the whole question into the dispassionate 
 arena of anthropological science, and it becomes 
 still clearer. What is it that makes the main 
 psychological difference between the average 
 savage and the average civilised man? Not a re- 
 lative subordination of emotion in the savage, not 
 a preponderance of it in the ordinary European. 
 The savage is clearly far more a creature of feel- 
 ing, in the wide sense of the word, than the civi- 
 lised white. His primary feelings are much more 
 violent when they come into play. His curiosity is 
 a wild excitement, his rage is a frenzy, his devo- 
 tion is a passion, his fear is a paralysis ; and when 
 we sum up the states of mind which make up an 
 ordinary year of his life we find they consist far 
 more of pure emotion — that is of mere sensation 
 of appetite, of desire, of hatred, of curiosity, of 
 general physical excitement, and of fear — far more 
 of these than of reflection or reasoning ; and this 
 not only absolutely, but relatively to the life of the 
 civilised white. The lower savages are unreflect- 
 ing and devoid of foresight in an extreme degree. 
 It is told of the Caribs^ that they will sell their 
 hammocks for less in the morning than in the 
 
 *By Labat, writing in 1724. See Waitz, 'Introduction 
 to Anthropology,' Eng. trans., p. 295. 
 
Emotion in History. 186 
 
 evening, so incapable are they of realising- for 
 twelve hours in advance the!/ inevitable future. 
 And like those higher barbarians whom Mr. Wal- 
 lace has described so attractively,! they are at the 
 same time capable of passing from a state of good 
 humor to one of murderous fury in a few minutes, 
 just as two encountering dogs may at the mere 
 sight of each other pass from a normal state of 
 temper into one of destructive rage. These, then, 
 are the out-and-out creatures of emotion ; the or- 
 ganisms in which feeling most absolutely deter- 
 mines conduct ; and they can scarcely be called a 
 moral success. 
 
 Consider, now, in the light of our examples, 
 what an emotion practically is. It is, as the term 
 etymologically implies, an outflow of feeling, a 
 moving of the nervous being ; and this kind of 
 nervous excitation, in one sort or another, may 
 exist either in company of a primitive appetite or 
 passion or an irrational belief, or in company with 
 a high principle, or a wide sympathy, or a selfish 
 desire, or a base purpose. It is, so to speak, the 
 striking of the clock — the clock being the 
 mechanism of the mind, in which every moment*s 
 condition is the outcome of one that went before ; 
 and if for the sake of the metaphor you will con- 
 sider the different hours on the dial to represent 
 different perceptions, from the animal desires up 
 to the joy of self-denial and the enthusiasm of 
 
 t * Malay Archipelago,' vol. ii, pp. 443, 460. 
 
186 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 humanity ; and if you will further regard the clock 
 hands as the percipient intelligence — the intellec- 
 tual and the physical consciousness — then the 
 figure becomes not inapt. The human personality 
 is a striking clock ; and neither does the striking 
 move the hands, nor the mere motion of the hands 
 cause the striking ; but both alike are the results 
 of the obscure mechanism within — the hands mov- 
 ing and pointing noiselessly, and the bell doing its 
 part in sahent sound. And in the well-ordered 
 clock you cannot have the one without the other. 
 If the machine strikes at random, or always before 
 the hour, you say it has gone wrong : your clock 
 that does nothing but strike is the analogue of the 
 madman ; while your clock which does not strike 
 for the higher sympathies, but marks only egoisms 
 and appetites, is in another way an undesirable 
 instrument. 
 
 But, to pass from the metaphor, the important 
 truth for us all is this, that not only are ideas and 
 emotions not antagonistic aspects of conscious- 
 ness, but they are positively inconceivable apart. 
 There is positively no perception whatever, 
 whether physical or intellectual, whether abstract 
 or concrete, that does not involve an emotion, in 
 its due degree, as surely as an object placed in 
 light casts its shadow. You might smile if I 
 named some of the conditions of mind which, on 
 this principle, are to be conceived of as involving 
 emotion, like every other, on their own small 
 scale ; but it is not perfectly clear that every sen- 
 
Emotion in History. 187 
 
 sation of physical pleasure and physical pain, to 
 begin with, has an aspect correlative with those 
 higher spiritual exaltations which we best remem- 
 ber; that the gratification of curiosity, the memory 
 of a bereavement, the solution of a mathematical 
 problem, the perception of skill in a work of art, 
 or beauty or ugliness in an object, the appreciation 
 of truth in a thought or nobleness in an action — 
 is it not clear that all these are cases in which a 
 simple state of consciousness, of thought or of 
 simple sense, swells into the suffused sensation 
 which we name emotion, and cannot even be re- 
 cognised save as the emotion supervenes? 
 
 And if this be found invariably true of the 
 higher forms of ideation — if this passage from per- 
 ceiving to feeling be there a simple matter of 
 course, then it follows that just such a passage 
 from perceiving to feeling takes place in every pro- 
 cess of sane consciousness whatever, from the 
 most trivial intellectual operation to the highest 
 and profoundest. You have it in the trifling case 
 of your hardly perceptible satisfaction when you 
 get your change right after making purchases in a 
 shop, and you have it in its fitting degree in the 
 swelling of the heart of Franklin when he found he 
 had drawn lightning from the cloud, of Archi- 
 medes when he had solved his problem, of Thacke- 
 ray when he felt he had accomplished a stroke of 
 genius in his novel ;^ and you have not merely 
 
 *When some one praised the passage in 'Vanity Fair' 
 in which Rebecca admires her husband as he strikes down 
 
188 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 noble emotional poetry but the strictest scientific 
 truth in the lyrical cry of Keats over his first read- 
 ing of Chapman *s Homer : 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes 
 He stared on the Pacific, and all his men 
 Looked at each other, with a wild surmise, 
 Silent, upon a peak of Darien." 
 
 Be sure there is no process of reasoning which 
 fails of its throb of emotion in the exact degree of 
 its depth and clearness ; no altitudes of the intel- 
 lect where the fires of feeling do not glow ; and if 
 it should ever seem to you that that white light of 
 truth which men say shines on the loftier heights 
 is a cold radiance, bethink you whether you might 
 not there at times find healing from the scorchings 
 of the fires of passion and of suffering which you 
 chance upon below, or rest and soothing from the 
 changing heats and chills of the region of social 
 warfare and aspiration. However that may be 
 for each one of us, there the great law remains, 
 that the thrill of the astronomer over the new truth 
 he has wrested from the vast book of the heavens 
 is but a higher phase of the play of cerebral intelli- 
 gence than the wonder of the earliest man over the 
 strangely-shaped stone in which he divines a 
 deity ; and that when, in contemplating the in- 
 finite mystery of things, we are shaken " with 
 
 the Marquis, Thackeray admitted that on writing the 
 description he threw down his pen, exclaiming it was a 
 stroke of genius. 
 
Emotion in History. 189 
 
 thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls '\ we 
 are still paralleling the simplest instance in which 
 the awakening of an idea or perception in our con- 
 sciousness flows into something which, while we 
 cannpt dissociate it from the thought, we call an 
 emotion. 
 
 And now it may be asked, what is the practical 
 lesson to be drawn from this law of human 
 nature. It is, I think, not obscure, and not un- 
 important. What we have seen is that while the 
 emotions of the lower man are few, violent and 
 preponderating, being little modified by reflection, 
 those of the higher man are many, are more subtle, 
 are really more extensive than the savage's — see- 
 ing that the latter has very many hours 
 of mere lethargy — and are above all balanced 
 and guided by the cultivated reason. The 
 difference between a good clerk and a bad 
 clerk, said a shrewd man of business once 
 to me, is sim.ply that the good clerk does 
 everything twice ; and this thinking twice is, 
 broadly speaking, the secret of improvement in 
 conduct. Or, to put it otherwise, what we want 
 is not the divorce of emotion from action, that be- 
 ing indeed a contradiction in terms, but the secur- 
 ing that the force of emotion shall accrue to the 
 best ideas and desires rather than to the worst, so 
 that the balance of action shall be beneficent. And 
 this is the practical truth contained in the teach- 
 ing of Buckle, that as the multiplication of higher 
 ideas and desires means widened knowledge, it is 
 
190 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 the widening knowledge of mankind that deter- 
 mines their course — moral progress being impos- 
 sible without intellectual ; or, as we may say, to 
 go back to our homely figure, the clock cannot go 
 on striking the hours when the hands are not 
 moving. 
 
 Remember, all the effective emotion of the past 
 related itself to ideas, and what you want is that 
 new ideas shall he substituted for these, thus 
 bringing about a new direction of that motor force 
 which we call emotion. It was strictly an ex- 
 aggeration to say that our savage, or even our 
 dog, represented emotion pure and simple : there 
 too the emotion, be it of love or hatred or desire, 
 flows from a definite perception in sense or in 
 memory. The nearest approach to a contagion 
 of pure emotion is that of a dancing mania such 
 as we read of in history and occasionally in the 
 newspapers ; or an epidemic of hysteria ; and 
 such phenomena are really forms of disease. Nor- 
 mal emotion belongs to an idea. Affect the per- 
 ception, the idea, alter or modify or supersede 
 that, and the emotion will take care of itself as 
 surely as your shadow. The emotion of 
 patriotism which hurled the people of Greece 
 triumphantly against the invading hosts of Per- 
 sia was a stress of feeling round a few vivid 
 memories and forecasts ; and that emotion has 
 affected all subsequent European civilisation 
 mainly for the better. The excitement of medieval 
 Christendom for the Crusades was just another 
 
Emotion in History, 191 
 
 outburst of feeling upon one or two simple intel- 
 lectual conceptions ; and these conceptions hap- 
 pening to be false and foolish, and the emotion for 
 them happening to be so violent and so unhappily 
 fostered, the net result was a mere tempest of de- 
 struction and misery, leaving no discernible 
 balance of good, and involving lasting harm in the 
 barbarising of European modes of thought, and 
 the direct arrest of nobler tendencies. 
 
 Our formula, it may be said, does not go far, 
 but at least it is of universal validity. And it 
 clears the way for others. Applying it to the rise 
 of Christianity, we say that the Christian move- 
 ment began in the acceptance of a definite idea — 
 the idea of an incarnation of deity ; and that if, 
 in some countries, the new religion became more 
 emotional than those before it, it was exactly in so 
 far as the dazzling idea of a sacrifice by divinity 
 on behalf of humanity — new to them though fami- 
 liar to other races — generated a new outbreak of 
 emotion. But this emotion, mark, could soon co- 
 exist or alternate with the emotions of hate, 
 whether religious or secular ; hate to the enemies 
 of the new deity, or to heretic companions, com- 
 ing in as soon as the first trance of the new idea 
 was over. And we say that if that idea was in- 
 tellectually unsound, it cannot conceivably be per- 
 manent ; that the emotion for it cannot save it 
 from the advance of truer ideas ; and that to 
 abandon it for the truer ideas is not at all to make 
 an end of religious emotion as such but to give it 
 
192 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 a new and better bias. Nay, so absolute is the 
 union of emotion and intelligence that we tend to 
 go astray even in speaking thus ; for the very de- 
 sire to substitute the true for the false is in itself 
 an emotion ; so that it is by an impulse of feeling 
 as fundamental as our appetites that we turn from 
 the incredible doctrine to the credible ; and the 
 passion of the sceptic for truth is as essentially an 
 emotion as the yearning of the believer for spiri- 
 tual rest. 
 
 All this seems rather a truism than a truth when 
 we think it over ; and yet how far are we from 
 putting the truth in practice ! See what it in- 
 volves. It implies that an emotion in itself is no 
 criterion of its own rightness or value ; that the 
 French Revolution might be in large measure a 
 beneficent outbreak of emotion over true ideas, and 
 a pernicious play of further emotion over delu- 
 sions. It reminds us that the struggle for and 
 against slavery really represented a conflict of 
 emotions, and that the one was as genuine as the 
 other. From all which it follows that we can 
 never be too studious of the beliefs to which our 
 emotions attach, whether by processes of compari- 
 son or of analysis, these being the only means open 
 to us of checking our tendencies and of seeing 
 whether we are making for good or for evil in the 
 world. If we did but hold this idea firmly, how 
 many of our antagonisms would slacken ; how 
 many of our prepossessions would grow temper- 
 ate ; how many of our fanaticisms would lose 
 
Emotion in History. 198 
 
 their heat ! Instead of there being a presumption 
 against every bold new idea, there would be a 
 certain leaning to a presumption in favor of it. 
 
 To-day, for instance, there is a very natural re- 
 sentment among certain classes at proposals for 
 what is known as a graduated income tax, and for 
 imposing certain obligations on land-owners. I 
 am not now inquiring whether these proposals are 
 reasonable or not. But I do say that when we 
 go back in imagination to the beginnings of the 
 French Revolution ; when we remember how the 
 French noblesse actually paid no taxes at all, leav- 
 ing the whole State burdens to fall on the artificers, 
 and on the wretched tillers of the soil, and how 
 they yet strenuously and warmly resisted the pro- 
 posals to tax them^ — when we recall these things, 
 we are at least driven to question whether the case 
 of the contemporary English upper class is funda- 
 mentally different from that of the old French 
 upper class. What is certain is that the emotion 
 of resentment in the one case was as genuine and 
 as spontaneous as in the other. 
 
 And so with our enthusiasms. Remembering 
 that the mere warmth of our feeling for our belief 
 is not in itself a test of our rightness, should we 
 not sometimes temper our estimate of those who 
 differ from us? It is only too clear that even a 
 humane emotion gives no security for its own pro- 
 
 * For making the proposal Turgot was dismissed from 
 office. See Carlyle's 'History', B. ii, c. iv ; and the 
 Essay on Turgot in Mr. Morley's Critical Miscellanies. 
 
 o 
 
194 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 per application ; and that a warm affection for 
 animals, for instance, may entirely fail to make an 
 anti-vivisector just and candid to those who op- 
 pose him. But there is a further and less obvious 
 corollary. It has probably surprised many 
 thoughtful people recently to find such a writer as 
 Mr. Arnold suddenly taking up the cry of the war- 
 party in regard to the episode of the battle of 
 Majuba Hill in the Transvaal War, and deriding 
 the Ministry! which had had the unusual courage 
 — a courage, unfortunately, not exhibited since — 
 to cut short an admittedly unjustifiable war when it 
 was found to be unjustifiable, even though our 
 arms had sustained a reverse in the earlier part of 
 it. Mr. Arnold sneered at this policy. I do not 
 say that Mr. Arnold's writings never before ex- 
 hibited such a spirit ; but certainly many of us 
 were surprised to see it in him ; and it seemed to 
 need explanation. Now, what strikes one on re- 
 flection is that similar championship of what had 
 otherwise appeared a barbarous policy has come 
 at different times from such writers as Carlyle, 
 Kingsley, and Mr. Ruskin — as, for instance, in 
 the case of Governor Eyre's doings in Jamaica ; 
 and that one thing these writers had in common 
 even with Mr. Arnold was a strong tendency to 
 stand up for certain ways of thinking, apparently 
 not so much because they were true as because 
 they were old. From which one is strongly led to 
 
 t See his article in the Nineteenth Century, February, 1885. 
 
Emotion in History. 195 
 
 infer that a constant bias to the ideas of the past 
 — ideas, that is, which the modern mind is discard- 
 ing- or has discarded — tends to involve a reproduc- 
 tion of the emotions of the past, and these pre- 
 cisely the most undesirable ones. 
 
 For the emotions react on each other, and pre- 
 pare the way for each other, till, whether for good 
 or bad, they go far to determine the acceptance 
 of ideas. It has been the happy distinction of ad- 
 vanced religious thought in this country that it has 
 iisually been identified with the love of freedom 
 and the love of peace ; and it is surely significant 
 that an emotion of a more or less contrary ten- 
 dency should be found associated with more or less 
 reactionary tenets. For, indeed, this respect for 
 the mere assertion of force is one of the most in- 
 veterate of the emotional aberrations of our race. 
 It distorts many men's whole conception of the 
 past, enabling them to see only a halo of glory 
 round their country *s history at a time when it was 
 full of misery and largely governed by mean 
 ideals ; and the whole cause of the transfiguration 
 is the record of certain naval and military vic- 
 tories. It makes it possible for an admirable poet 
 to sing of a " hope for the world in the coming 
 wars '', and to create a contemporary cultus of 
 sentimental bloodshed which has been fitly 
 summed up in the injunction, ** Go to the Crimea 
 and thou shalt be saved ^\ It produces a popu- 
 lar attitude of oscillation between callous disre- 
 gard for the status of our soldiers in time of peace 
 
196 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 and barbaric jubilation over them when they have 
 had some slaughter to perform. From all which 
 harmful things it is the work of all good men to 
 deliver us. 
 
 It will not be an easy task, or one soon per- 
 formed. The poet who sang that the meanest 
 flower could give him thoughts lying too deep for 
 tears, was he who sang that Carnage was God*s 
 daughter ; and even the young George Eliot, sen- 
 sitively attuned to high and humane feehngs, is 
 for a time capable of the same strange creed ; so 
 subtle and so sinister are the kinships of those 
 emotions which we are so often tempted to hail 
 as something higher and nobler than patient 
 thought. The final truth is that the general level 
 of emotion follows the general movement of 
 thought — this being the real explanation of the 
 anti-slavery struggle, in which it was not one idea 
 or one emotion that did the work, but the broad 
 development of culture made a new form of emo- 
 tion possible, which in turn fostered a new doc- 
 trine. The new generation differs subtly from the 
 old in its whole mental texture, and thus can re- 
 spond to appeals to which that was deaf. 
 
 We conclude, then, that the upward path for 
 men lies by the way of knowledge and reason — a 
 path from which emotion is in nowise shut out, 
 but in which it is ever more finely touched to finer 
 issues. The path will have its thorns. It may 
 present to us great minds curiously lacking in 
 some forms of sympathy — a Hawthorne strangely 
 
Emotion in History. 197 
 
 unconcerned about slavery ; a Gibbon terrified in- 
 to mere fury by a revolution which rights ancient 
 wrongs ; a great evolutionist who may strenuously 
 seek to promote the blind struggle for existence ; 
 but in so far as such a thinker gives us truth he 
 can work only our weal, and if he ever teach mis- 
 takenly he will be baffled by forces of beneficence 
 which he himself has stirred. It is such a thinker 
 who has admirably warned us against ** the pro- 
 foundest of all infidelity, the fear lest the truth be 
 bad.''^ Free from that fear, we may dream of 
 a future in which emotion shall have become so 
 constantly bent to the betterment of things that 
 men*s lives will be a harmonious union, as of 
 ** perfect music unto noble words **. We to-day, 
 alas, cannot even fully dream such a scene and 
 such a life ; but in this indefinable hope, as in all 
 good thoughts, our reason and our emotions 
 blend. 
 
 * Spencer's Essays, vol. i, * Progress, Its Laws and 
 Cause,' p. 59. 
 
THE ETHICS OF VIVISECTION. 
 
 (1885.) 
 
 An interesting and even a helpful study in moral 
 science would be a tracing out by the student of 
 the history of his own notions as to right and 
 wrong, from the earliest point to which his 
 memory can go back, down to the moment of the 
 investigation. Few people, perhaps, could give 
 any very detailed account of the transformations 
 their ethical beliefs have undergone since they be- 
 gan to think on moral questions. For the changes 
 have in most cases been extremely numerous — 
 how numerous only the habitually introspective 
 can claim to say. 
 
 A tolerably early stage of moral development 
 with most of us is that in which the child, apart 
 from its own instincts of approbation and resent- 
 ment, has no feeling save one of curiosity in re- 
 gard to matters of moral judgment. At this stage 
 the child is only attaining a knowledge of what 
 other people regard as right and wrong ; the 
 promptings of desire are followed with no hesita- 
 tions save those given rise to by outside precept ; 
 blame for selfish conduct is at first received with 
 more or less open astonishment ; and the ten- 
 dency is to ask absolutely frank and extremely 
 embarrassing questions of elders as to why a 
 given act is wrong. It being the practice of the 
 
 < 198 ) 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 199 
 
 elders to reply with decisive a priori solutions, the 
 youthful mind has no resource but to assimilate 
 as well as may be the a priori code presented to it ; 
 and of this code the child's conduct becomes a 
 more or less dubious application. Perplexities are 
 likely to occur in the minds of the more inquisitive 
 in regard to many forbidden acts in which they 
 can see no harm ; and there is a distinct balance 
 of probability that any child will on every oppor- 
 tunity commit acts obscurely ** felt " to be wrong, 
 because forbidden ; but with only a slight and 
 soon forgotten sense of discomfort in the breach 
 of law. Many grown-up people, now above the 
 average in respect of scrupulosity, will confess to 
 having lied and stolen in their well-trained child- 
 hood with only a moderate degree of perturbation 
 as against the pleasure of escaping blame or secur- 
 ing a coveted object. The individual becomes a 
 moral organism, so to speak, only by degrees ; 
 his most rapid transition, after that from moral 
 nescience to pupillage, being in all probability that 
 which takes place sometime in his teens, when he 
 makes some approach to intelligent thinking on 
 religion. The youth whose good fortune it is to 
 proceed slowly from doubt to doubt, till he at- 
 tains complete rationalism, is likely to have a 
 specially complex experience in respect of his 
 moral creed. At first, when he is rejecting or has 
 rejected the dogma of an inspired or heaven-sent 
 code, he sees no serious difficulty in adjusting his 
 moral judgments. Right and wrong are no harder 
 
200 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 problems for him than they were before; and his 
 acquired view as to g^iven lines of secular conduct 
 remains to him, though he may be secretly con- 
 scious of having- contravened his code rather 
 freely. He fs now clear enough as to there be- 
 ing nothing wrong in staying away from church 
 or amusing himself on Sunday : his reasonings 
 have involved that : and other matters remain for 
 him very much as they were. But this is only be- 
 cause of his comprehensive inexperience ; and his 
 mental history soon begins to be a record of steps 
 towards a systematic moral philosophy. When 
 he intelligently and vitally grasps the great prin- 
 ciple of utility he has undergone the third de- 
 cisive readjustment of his intellectual relations to 
 life ; and, filled with the light of the master idea, 
 he is convinced, perhaps, that morals is henceforth 
 for him all plain sailing. Then comes, however, 
 the further experience of manhood, which gradu- 
 ally forces on him the conviction that there is no 
 royal road to right conduct ; that utility is a con- 
 stantly fluctuating attribute in actions ; and that 
 the simple formula, logically all-embracing as it is, 
 for that very reason fails to pack men's acts into 
 hard-and-fast divisions of permanently good and 
 bad. 
 
 This kind of individual experience does but imi- 
 tate in miniature the history of the race, of which 
 the progress has been from pre-moral simplicity to 
 the stage of universal questioning ; and it is diffi- 
 cult to understand how even minds which cleave to 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 201 
 
 the religious creeds of the past can fail, in the 
 cases in which any reasonable penetration can be 
 claimed for them, to recognise both in themselves 
 and in humanity at large the evolutionary charac- 
 ter of conscience. We may indeed be sure that 
 they have undergone a substantially similar ex- 
 perience, and v^e may set down their assertion of 
 an entirely intuitional theory of morals to the 
 capacity for inconsistency which inheres in every 
 Theist as such. That they can have constantly 
 gone on from strength to strength of unwavering 
 moral conviction is not to be believed. Yet two 
 of the stock arguments against utilitarian morality 
 are that it leaves room for dubiety, the implication 
 being that the believer in inspiration is never in 
 doubt as to his line of action ; and that it can lend 
 itself to wrong conduct, as if religious belief never 
 did. To describe such arguments is to destroy 
 them ; and it almost savors of brutality to track 
 the orthodox to the last rallying ground on which, 
 driven to distraction by the scientific blockade on 
 all hands, they feebly resume the internecine strife 
 of their earlier prime. The spectacle becomes a 
 trifle pitiful. Says one Christian Professor, laying 
 down * First Principles of Moral Science': **A 
 person follows his conscience when he does what 
 he sincerely thinks to be his duty, though he may 
 have mistaken his duty, and acted on a wrong 
 judgment '*. Whereto another Christian Profes- 
 sor replies : ** I greatly prefer to say, that the man 
 sincerely thinks he is following his conscience. 
 
202 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 when in reality he is not doing so, rather than lay 
 to the charge of conscience the mass of our errone- 
 ous judgments''.* That is to say, A. 's conscience, 
 which has a distinct existence, gives him the ad- 
 monition ''don't", which A. in all good faith takes 
 to be ''do"; but B., who is similarly liable to mis- 
 hear his conscience, can be quite sure that \. 's said 
 the opposite of what A. thought, and vice versa. 
 Such is moral science as endowed in our universi- 
 ties ; reverend gentlemen setting forth in lectures 
 and hand-books what they " prefer to say ", good 
 souls ! 
 
 I have thus preliminarily alluded to these gene- 
 ral matters in order, not to enlarge on them, but, 
 on the contrary, to treat them briefly, and so keep 
 within limits the following examination of the 
 ethics of vivisection, it being the tendency of a 
 thoroughgoing discussion of any question in ethics 
 to bring under survey the whole range of the 
 science — if science it be. The lines of the argu- 
 ment on either side can easily be carried back, on 
 the foregoing basis, by the reader who thinks it 
 worth while to do so. But the candid enquirer 
 may perhaps find that he has had enough of tran- 
 scendental morals for the present, when we have 
 briefly examined its teachings on vivisection. 
 
 It is no part of our business here to inquire 
 whether or not vivisection in the past has furthered 
 medical science. All we have to do on that head 
 
 * * Handbook of Moral Philosophy,' by the Rev. Pro- 
 fessor Calderwood, of Edinburgh. Appendix A. 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 203 
 
 is to note that while the opponents of the practice 
 dispute, not without ability, every claim made for 
 it by its defenders, it is still resorted to under dis- 
 couragement and inconvenience by some men who 
 have no shadow of satisfaction in giving- pain, and 
 who sincerely count on obtaining useful results to 
 add to those they believe to have been got by the 
 same means. The motive for our inquiry is that 
 the anti-vivisectionists, while thus disputing, as 
 they are logically free to do, the practical efficacy 
 of vivisection, strongly contend that it is morally 
 indefensible even if serviceable. It is for the in- 
 tuitionalists here to note that the question of the 
 moral rightness is just as strenuously disputed as 
 that of the scientific fact. 
 
 The steps in the controversy are few and simple. 
 The anti-vivisectionist, whom we shall call A, al- 
 leges that man has '* no right '* to give animals 
 pain with a view of escaping it himself. The vivi- 
 sectionist, whom we shall call V., alleging that the 
 right does exist, puts it on all fours with the right 
 to use animals for food or to make them work. 
 A. replies that, granted the right to kill for food 
 and to put to service, the right to give pain does 
 not follow. And here sets in the deadlock. V. 
 either points to the predacity of animals as indica- 
 ting the deity's purpose to let one set of them pro- 
 fit by the sufferings of others ; or argues that it is 
 for man to decide how far he shall carry his virtu- 
 ally unchallenged right to affect the lot of the 
 creatures inferior to him. On the theistic side A. 
 
204 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 replies that to plead the example of the brutes Is 
 to degrade our moral standards ; and as against 
 the non-theistic way of putting it he (or she — it is 
 often she) reiterates the denial of the ** right ". 
 
 What then is a ** right ** ; and how is it made 
 out in the case before us? We have seen that 
 A. does not deny the right of man to put animals 
 to service ; and as a rule he concedes the right 
 to kill for food, though some of the party are 
 understood to deny that. Now, either of these 
 cases will suffice to show that the ** right ** of man 
 over animals is simply the assertion of his power. 
 It is occasionally argued, indeed, that where man 
 feeds and cares for an animal his right to its ser- 
 vices is one of quid pro quo ; but it is only neces- 
 sary to turn to the case of human slavery to find 
 that ** right *' in this connection has no recogni- 
 tion in contemporary morals. No ethical au- 
 thority now alleges that any one has the ** right " 
 to keep another in slavery on the score that he 
 gives him food and shelter. What is really im- 
 plied in the conception of *' right '', as regards the 
 relations between men, is simply the sympathetic 
 putting of ourselves in the place of an abstract 
 *' other ", and vesting in that other our own in- 
 stincts of self-preservation and self-assertion. We 
 revolt at the idea of being sold and coerced ; and 
 we revolt on behalf of others who so suffer. That 
 is the basis of all our conceptions of '* rights '* as 
 between man and man. 
 
 A contrary view, indeed, is widely held. "There 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 205 
 
 can, I think, be no doubt," says Stuart Mill, *'that 
 the idee mere^ the primitive element in the forma- 
 tion of the notion of justice, was conformity to 
 law.''* But that theory leaves us without any ex- 
 planation of the origin of law. Are we to say 
 that law was an inexplicable *' variation '* in social 
 evolution — that laws were formed at random, in 
 obedience to no instincts or convictions ; and that 
 whatever they enacted became the standard of 
 conduct? What about the rejection and abolition 
 of laws that were held bad? Mill admits that we 
 stamp as unjust some actions which no law con- 
 demns ; and he offers the explanation that ** even 
 here, the idea of the breach of what ought to be 
 law, still lingers in a modified shape " ; which is 
 simply a surrender of the previous contention. 
 The idea of '' what ought to be law " is the no- 
 tion of justice ; and the truth is seen to be exactly 
 the reverse of Mill's proposition : that is to say, 
 the " notion of justice " is the idee mere of law, 
 not law of justice. 
 
 It would be interesting, but difficult, to ascer- 
 tain how far the vogue of Mill's doctrine is to be 
 credited to the traditions of English jurisprudence. 
 From the legal point of view, indeed, the affilia- 
 tion of justice to law has a certain practical rea- 
 sonableness, which is no doubt present to the 
 minds of the publicists who declare that *' there 
 is no such thing as * natural right ' ". What they 
 
 ** Utilitarianism,* 7th ed., p. 70. 
 
206 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 perceive is that the conceptions of "natural right'' 
 among- different people are often conflicting ; and 
 that law must be the decisive standard of appeal 
 in society. But it is a perversion of this idea to 
 teach, as Mr. Arnold does, that on self-examina- 
 tion we shall find we have no rights, only duties. 
 That formula is suicidal, appealing as it does to a 
 feeling which is capable of analysis just as far as, 
 and no further than, the sentiment of " right ". 
 The consciousness of duty, obviously, exists only 
 in correlation with the consciousness of right : our 
 " duty '' is simply the impulse to let others have 
 their rights, which we cognise by sympathy.! 
 
 We attribute " natural rights '*, then, to those 
 whom we conceive as having the same kind of 
 affections and instincts as ourselves ; and wher- 
 ever such rights are openly or tacitly denied it will 
 be found that the denier virtually lacks this con- 
 ception of similarity. The tyrannous Englishman 
 among inferior races ; the Western American ill- 
 using Chinese ; the Boer oppressing Zulus — all re- 
 gard the races they oppress as feeling very differ- 
 ently from themselves. Here, as in every other 
 direction, it is substantially knowledge that 
 
 t Mr. Spencer, who has lately revived the " dormant con- 
 troversy " on this subject, points out that " a whole school 
 of legists on the Continent maintains a belief diametrically 
 opposed to that maintained by the English school. The 
 idea of 'Naturrecht is the root-idea of German jurisprudence. 
 Now, whatever may be the opinion held respecting German 
 philosophy at large, it cannot be characterised as shallow." 
 * The Man versus the State,' p. 87. 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 207 
 
 ameliorates conduct, thoug-h the knowledge may 
 come by way of a variation towards sensitiveness. 
 But how, then, on this view, does it stand with 
 the claim of ** rights " for the lower animals? If 
 we recognised rights inhering in them as in the 
 inferior races, it is clear that we should not even 
 feel ourselves entitled to keep them in forced ser- 
 vice, much less to kill them ; whereas in point of 
 fact we do not even trouble ourselves to make 
 sure that we have the ** right '* to tame and work 
 horses. The one check we [that is, men of normal 
 temperament] recognise in the matter is in regard 
 to over-working or ill-using them : there we have 
 scruples ; but that only amounts to saying that at 
 a certain point we so far conceive similarity be- 
 tween us and the horse as to shrink from causing 
 him serious injury. We do not credit him with 
 our own moral revolt against subjection : we 
 credit him only with feeling pain. 
 
 On the other hand, we do not seriously scruple 
 to put a horse to any stress of exertion, even to 
 the point of killing him, when it is a question of 
 our escaping, say, from hostile savages ; because 
 here we do not credit him with sense of martyr- 
 dom — only, as before, with feeling pain. The 
 *' right '* to kill for food, again, can hardly be said 
 to be seriously disputed ; for even the extreme 
 vegetarian would kill animals rather than let them 
 overrun our fields ; and it comes to be a question 
 between breeding for slaughter on the one hand 
 and extermination or partial prevention of breed- 
 
^08 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 ing on the other. Once killed, an animal may, 
 ethically speaking, as well be eaten as not. All 
 round, then, we make our own needs and interests 
 our guides in dealing with animals, recognising 
 no indefeasible right on their side because we do 
 not hold that they feel as a breach of any ** natu- 
 ral right *' what would be a breach of that felt 
 by a m.an. We forcibly tame and burden, we 
 castrate (i.e. vivisect), we kill by forced over- 
 exertion, we kill for food : on what grounds, then, 
 shall we deny ourselves the ** right '* to give ani- 
 mals pain with the object of furthering our medi- 
 cal knowledge to our own advantage? 
 
 I am not aware of any argument on the anti- 
 vivisectionists* side which can be pretended to 
 meet that question; and their case therefore seems 
 to me to break down, so far as the appeal to our 
 sense of " right '* goes. But as the old saying 
 runs, we shall never fully refute an error until we 
 have shown how it arose ; and the origin of the 
 anti-vivisectionist fallac}^ above analysed is a very 
 interesting matter for further enquiry. That 
 wrathful controversialist Miss Frances Power 
 Cobbe, in her pamphlet on ' The Moral Aspects of 
 Vivisection ', thus expresses herself : 
 
 ** But it is impossible to regard this subject as 
 if it were a mere abstract ethical problem. The 
 vivisection of dull reptiles, and wild rats and 
 rabbits, wherewith the elder generation of stu- 
 dents contented themselves, is not alone in ques- 
 tion, nor even that of heavy beasts in our pas- 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 209 
 
 tures ; but by some strange and sinister fatality, 
 the chosen victims at present are the most intelli- 
 gent and friendly of our domestic favorites — the 
 cats who purr in love and confidence as they sit 
 beside us on the hearth, the dogs whose faithful 
 hearts glow with an affection for us, truer and 
 fonder than we may easily find in any human 
 breast. To disregard all the beautiful and noble 
 moral qualities which such animals exhibit, and 
 coldly contemplate them as if their quivering 
 frames were mere machines of bone and tissue 
 which it might be interesting and profitable to ex- 
 plore with forceps and scalpel, is to display 
 heinous indifference to Love and Fidelity them- 
 selves, and surely to renounce the claim to be the 
 object of such sentiments to brute or man " (pp. 
 18-19). 
 
 All this is transparent enough to those ruthless 
 natures which are capable of exploring the quiver- 
 ing frame of the passage with the forceps and 
 scalpel of dispassionate analysis. Miss Cobbe is 
 an extreme anti-vivisectionist in that she does what 
 we have said the majority do not do — carry her 
 sympathy with animals to the extent of attribut- 
 ing to them, or some of them, a moral and emo- 
 tional nature closely resembling our own. She 
 lets it appear very plainly that she is moved by 
 purely personal sentiment as distinguished from 
 an impartial sense of justice. Her dog and cat 
 are a great deal to her, and it is the idea of their 
 suffering that excites her. The exigencies of pro- 
 
210 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 paganda force her to be so far consistent as to 
 protest against all vivisection, and to deprecate 
 *' sport " ; but it is tolerably plain that if it were 
 only " dull reptiles '' and *' wild rats and rabbits*', 
 and " the heavy beasts of our pastures *' that 
 were vivisected, she would not be greatly con- 
 cerned. That is, she is not defending a " right ** 
 inherent in sentient things as such — though she 
 refers to " Bishop Butler's grand axiom that 
 every sentient creature has an indefeasible claim 
 to be spared pain merely because it is sentient '* : 
 she is doing special pleading for some of them 
 for which she has a special liking. Her conten- 
 tion virtually is that cats and dogs have a better 
 right to be spared than rats and rabbits, because 
 they have the greater capacity for attachment to 
 us — which is simply putting an *' abstract ethical 
 problem '* where she disclaimed such a thing. 
 Now we have seen that we admit the '' rights '* 
 of men because we assume them to feel morally 
 and physically as we should do in their place ; but 
 Miss Cobbe's argument, to be relevant from that 
 point of view, would have to allege that we have 
 cause to believe that dogs and cats under vivisec- 
 tion will feel both morally and physically as we do. 
 We are entitled to believe, on the contrary, that 
 their sensitiveness to pain is less, and that they 
 have no moral feelings analogous to what a man's 
 would be under the circumstances. 
 
 To some readers that may sound unfeeling ; 
 and I am the more ready to come to the next part 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 211 
 
 of the investigation, which consists in asking 
 whether there are then no moral grounds for 
 checking vivisection. We punish certain forms 
 of cruelty to animals : is it not reasonable to do 
 so? There need be no hesitation in answering in 
 the affirmative ; but there is need to ascertain 
 carefully how we have come to act as we do in 
 the matter. The most salient fact in the case is 
 that when we see an animal wantonly ill-used we 
 ourselves suffer a distinct nervous shock, in part 
 closely resembling the shock we experience when 
 we see a horse fall or a dog run over, partly fur- 
 ther consisting of a revolt against the torturer. 
 Now this passionate repulsion is an almost in- 
 evitable and a not unhealthy sentiment ; but it is 
 bad penology at once to punish a man and to vili- 
 pend him ; and we shall be on safer ground when 
 we say that the offender is an example of incom- 
 plete or arrested development in respect of his 
 sympathies, and that our object should simply be 
 to restrain his wrong action by working on his 
 motives. If we can adequately influence him by 
 blame or persuasion, so much the better ; for judi- 
 cial action is a clumsy instrument, and the exem- 
 plary efl'ect of public punishment is largely mythi- 
 cal. 
 
 To make blame efficacious, however, is not 
 easy ; and in either case what we are doing is to 
 take action on the promptings of our jarred sym- 
 pathies, reinforced by the conviction that indul- 
 gence in wanton cruelty to animals tends to pro- 
 
212 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 duce a degraded and anti-social type of man, and 
 that letting it go without some kind of public re- 
 probation fosters callousness, and consequently 
 cruelty, in all directions. Here we deliberately 
 interfere with the liberty of our fellows ; and that 
 by way of asserting, not the rights of animals, 
 but our own ; for we do not claim for the hurt 
 beast our own right to freedom : we simply assert 
 our determination to protect our own sensibilities 
 in a case where we are quite convinced that the 
 wounding of them implies an anti-social tendency 
 in the aggressor. 
 
 The discerning reader perceives, no doubt, that 
 this is the form of argument used to support the 
 blasphemy and Sabbatarian laws, and religious 
 persecution generally. But the knowledge that in 
 these cases the conviction acted on has been mis- 
 taken, is a reason only for very narrowly testing 
 our conviction in the present case. We must 
 take this on its merits, as we do the question of 
 laws against personal indecency. I grant some 
 force in the contention that the true way to pre- 
 vent cruelty to animals is to teach consideration 
 to the young ; but I incline to think the preven- 
 tion of cruelty by law is about as safe, and stands 
 on the same moral footing, as the prohibition of 
 indecency. As it has been put by one distin- 
 guished physician, *' we owe it to ourselves " to 
 prevent wanton cruelty ; and when Miss Cobbe 
 exclaims that such an utterance betrays ignor- 
 ance of the very alphabet of morality, she only 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 213 
 
 demonstrates her own omission to learn that 
 alphabet. 
 
 We come now to the practical issue : Shall vivi- 
 section for purposes of medical research be sup- 
 pressed on the score that the practice is demoralis- 
 ing, whether useful or not ; or shall we withdraw 
 the restrictions at present laid on it? Those of us 
 who have no fixed prejudice against legislation as 
 such can see that there is a good deal to be said 
 for the present arrangement of licenses, which 
 puts some check on mere experiments in torture 
 and leaves a possibility of conscientious research. 
 For if some of the claims made for vivisectionists 
 be true, the practice may lead to most important 
 discoveries at the expense of no great infliction of 
 suffering ; and in view of our relations to animals 
 in general, it becomes a mere caprice to say that 
 we have no ** right '* under any circumstances to 
 profit by their pain. The question comes to be 
 one of the spirit in which the vivisection is done, 
 and the estimated tendency of the act in the given 
 case. But when the opponents of vivisection are 
 found protesting against licences on the ground 
 that to give them is to legalise cruelty, one sees 
 some cause to resist even the imposition of a 
 check. For how does the case stand? At this 
 moment a hundred forms of cruelty, in the shape 
 of ** sport '' and the poisoning of vermin, are not 
 even menaced by law ; and Miss Cobbe admits 
 that '* sportsmen " are to be found among those 
 who demand the suppression of vivisection. What 
 
214 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 we do is to put a rigorous check on the one form 
 of systematic tampering with animal life — apart 
 from butchering — which can be said to be pursued 
 from respectable or disinterested motives ; and 
 instead of impartially proposing to extend this 
 check to the less defensible forms the anti-vivi- 
 sectionists simply clamor against the modification 
 of the check as being a sanction. 
 
 There could not be a more nefarious tactic, 
 and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that 
 here as in other conjunctures the effect of a pre- 
 dominantly emotional bias is to foster a disregard 
 for one species of moral obligation in those who 
 loudly proclaim another. A benevolent passion 
 is in itself no safer a guide than passion of any 
 other kind. At the best the emotionalist has to 
 rely on stress of language rather than ratiocina- 
 tive persuasion ; and at the worst the desired 
 effect is compassed by fearless fabrication. Pro- 
 fessor Huxley is said to have complained of the 
 ** profligate lying of virtuous women " in this con- 
 nection ; and I can testify to having seen and 
 heard some of the lying, from both sexes. I have 
 heard one lady allege in a semi-public meeting 
 that the Professor had declared animals to be 
 automata who did not feel ; and on challenge she 
 could give no reference save a general one which 
 made it practically certain that she was simply 
 misrepresenting his Belfast address, in which he 
 maintained the thesis that men and animals alike 
 are automata, thus leaving the question of their 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 215 
 
 comparative capacity for pain just as it stood be- 
 fore ; and in which, besides, he expressly said, 
 benevolently rather than logically, that he was 
 strengthened in his rejection of the extreme Car- 
 tesian view by the recognition that it might en- 
 courage cruel treatment of animals. Between 
 such indulgences in reckless slander and the blun- 
 ders into which they fall through extreme ignor- 
 ance, some defenders of the " rights " of animals 
 make a rather sorry moral exhibition. Miss 
 Cobbe has been so egregiously absurd as to call a 
 ** reflex action '* a '' spasm of agony ^', not know- 
 ing that the sine qua non of the thing is the absence 
 of sensation in the subject ; and the Scottish Anti- 
 Vivisectionist Society a year or two ago made a 
 vehement attack on a Professor for the cruelty 
 of certain experiments in which he had pointed 
 out that there was no pain at all. Anyone with 
 the merest smattering of physiological knowledge 
 would have known as much from the reports ; but 
 the superfluously sympathetic zoophiles conceived 
 a decapitated frog and an amputated frog's leg 
 as writhing in agony under the hands of the de- 
 monstrator. 
 
 We see, then, that an excessive sympathy with 
 animals is not at all necessarily an elevating in- 
 fluence, but may, like every other unregulated 
 emotion, lead to some sorts of harmful conduct. 
 What does the extreme attachment to animals, 
 seen in so many anti-vivisectionists, really signify? 
 Obviously, a faculty for taking an extremely 
 
216 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 idealised [i.e.^ false) view of an animal's nature; 
 for misconceiving, consequently, the relations of 
 things in general ; and for keeping the reasoning 
 faculties in disastrous subjection to the passions. 
 People admit in theory that any personal quality 
 may become a vice merely by running to excess ; 
 but they singularly fail to apply the principle in 
 detail. The zoophile flatters himself that his love 
 of animals is a shining virtue, when in point of 
 fact it is an extravagance which in a measure 
 warps his moral nature, and makes him intellec- 
 tually unscrupulous towards men in proportion as 
 he is tender towards beasts. Take, further, the 
 conception of the nature of cats and dogs ex- 
 hibited in the above extract from Miss Cobbers 
 pamphlet. There is no word there of the other 
 side of the animal nature ; and no recognition of 
 the fact that the fidelity of cats and dogs is prac- 
 tically an unmoralised affection, being simply 
 given to those near them without any save in- 
 terested discrimination. That is the typical atti- 
 tude of the adorers of pets, among whom women 
 take the palm, the feminine nature being the more 
 affectional and consequently the more disposed to 
 regard affection as the essential matter in any per- 
 sonality — a tendency of very doubtful advantage. 
 The pet-lover is not disturbed by his cat's cruelties 
 to mice or his dog's ferocity towards other ani- 
 mals : these manifestations of character are 
 serenely set down to irresponsible '* instinct " ; 
 while the show of affection, which is equally a 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 217 
 
 matter of instinct, is called a ** noble moral 
 quality ". In short, the zoophile's zoophily is 
 mainly egotistic ; ^' my dog's devotion to me " 
 being taken as the summing-up of the dog's rela- 
 tion to life ; though sympathy so far operates as 
 to attribute like excellence to other people's dogs. 
 On the lines of Miss Cobbe's contention a dog 
 which is not devoted and a cat v^hich is not 
 affectionate would be almost legitimate subjects 
 for vivisection : which leaves the theory of ani- 
 mals' '' rights " in a rather chaotic condition. 
 
 Let the phenomenon of zoophily be simply taken 
 scientific note of like any other, and let its good 
 and bad sides be impartially recognised. The 
 good side is the cultivation of emotion and sym- 
 pathy, which is a condition of all moral and intel- 
 lectual progress ; the bad side is precisely the 
 undue exaltation of these at the cost of reason. 
 And let it not be supposed that the harm of this 
 ends with the slandering of opponents. I have 
 only glanced hitherto at the relation of anti-vivi- 
 sectionists to '' sport ", knowing that they sup- 
 pose themselves to have amply disposed of the 
 arguments on that head ; but it is highly impor- 
 tant to point out that it is their tendency to assert 
 a most pernicious moral canon in this very con- 
 nection. Miss Cobbe, while professing to dis- 
 approve of sport, thus defends the sportsman : 
 
 ** The parallel between Vivisection and Field 
 Sports is about as just and accurate as if a tyrant, 
 accused of racking his prisoners in his secret dun- 
 
218 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 I 
 
 geons, were to turn round and open a discussion 
 on the Lawfulness of War. That creatures who 
 chase and are chased all their days in fields and 
 waters should have an arch enemy and pursuer in 
 man may be differently estimated as ill or well. 
 But it is almost ludicrous to compare a fox-hunt 
 (for example), with its free chances of escape 
 and its almost instantaneous termination in the 
 annihilation of the poor fox when captured, with 
 the slow, long-drawn agonies of an affectionate 
 trustful dog, fastened down limb by limb, and 
 mangled on its torture trough.'* 
 
 Here Ave have a sample of the vicious reasoning 
 to which anti-vivisectionism may run, and at the 
 same time an exhibition of positive defect of im- 
 agination arising out of the moral bias. Note 
 the fatuity of the phrase about " free chances of 
 escape ", and the assumption that the fox suffers 
 nothing save in the moment of death. But worst 
 of all is the clear implication that to find enjoy- 
 ment in the terror of a hunted animal is venial 
 beside the simple act of inflicting pain for an 
 ulterior scientific purpose. Miss Cobbe, after 
 admitting that field sports do not *' seem to har- 
 monise with the highest type of cultivated and 
 human feeling'' goes on to say that ''the men 
 who follow them may at least plead the excuses of 
 custom and of partial ignorance ". This, when the 
 very contention in dispute is that the reasoned 
 and deliberate scientific action is right while the 
 following of custom and primitive instinct is bar- 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 219 
 
 barous ! Conceive of a hedonist sportsman plead- 
 ing that he is cruel by force of custom and out of 
 ignorance, and that he ought consequently to 
 escape blame, while the vivisector who hopes to 
 cure human ills deserves odium ! 
 
 And that is not all. Another facile moralist, 
 Dr. Anna Kingsford, asks, in reply to an alleged 
 argument : 
 
 ** Where is the analogy between the vivisector 's 
 laboratory, with its gagged, bound, and trembling 
 victims, carved to death in cold blood, and the 
 field of battle, where every man in each contend- 
 ing army fights for home and country under the 
 inspiration of enthusiasm, ambition, or the desire 
 for renown? ''^ 
 
 We need not go into the question of the 
 ** analogy '' ; but it is worth while to note how 
 here again we have the very bases of scientific 
 morality overturned in the teaching that the lust 
 of blood is unobjectionable when it pervades two 
 excited armies, but that the readiness to hurt an 
 animal in cold blood for a scientific purpose is 
 hateful. It is another illustration of the tenden- 
 cies of the emotional temperament. The same 
 person who shrieks at the deliberate vivisection of 
 a rabbit gets into a glow of enthusiasm over the 
 dreary old claptrap about soldiers *' fighting for 
 home and country '\ and the concept of ** ambi- 
 tion " and *' the desire for renown '\ The sol- 
 
 * * Unscientific Science : a Lecture.' Part II. 
 
220 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 dier drunk with carnage, and transformed into a 
 furious savage, mad to slay, is a poetic object in 
 her eyes ; the man who causes carefully measured 
 pain with an eye to benefiting his race is an 
 accursed thing. And this lady, with her f enchant 
 for insane war, is voluble on the subject of the 
 connection of vivisection with Materialism and 
 Atheism, she being a believer in what she calls 
 ** the occult Book '*, and a fervent Theist. As a 
 matter of fact her colleague Miss Cobbe co- 
 operates with Atheist anti-vivisectionists in 
 France, while she vilifies Atheists in the mass at 
 home ; and everybody knows that there are Free- 
 thinking anti-vivisectionists and Christian vivi- 
 sectionists in this country. The difference is, I 
 presume, that the Freethinking opponent of vivi- 
 section is satisfied that it does more harm than 
 good, and acts on his conviction as the rest of us 
 would. But the final question for us at present is 
 this : Ought we to help to maintain the close 
 checks on vivisection while those who oppose the 
 practice not only clamor for its entire suppression, 
 but openly make light of barbarous practices as to 
 the immorality and perniciousness of which there 
 can be no dispute among fair moralists? There 
 is the dilemma. An out-and-out anti-vivisec- 
 tionist sees no serious harm in letting the house- 
 maid kill the rats by slow poison ; but hotly de- 
 nounces the doctor for vivisecting a rabbit under 
 anaesthetics. We who try to make our morality 
 reasonable ask which practice is the less de- 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 221 
 
 moralising and does the most good with its harm : 
 our emotionalist decides the matter by calling the 
 doctor ** cold-blooded ^\ and noting the house- 
 maid's excitement over her operations. We say 
 that thoughtlessness in sport, as in everything 
 else, makes against civilisation ; and that the war 
 spirit is a deplorable survival from times of sava- 
 gery : our emotional friend thinks long custom 
 partly condones evils, and considers war rather a 
 fine thing, telling us that it promotes *' courage", 
 while vivisection is ** cowardice '*. On the one 
 hand we have the doubtful question whether the 
 licensing system meets the ends we have in view ; 
 on the other we have the spectacle of the anti- 
 vivisection movement making for irrationality in 
 ethics, empiricism in general thought, gross par- 
 tiality in practice, falsehood in controversy, and 
 the encouragement of the military spirit. Is it 
 not expedient rather to expose these tendencies 
 than to lend our voices to the condemnation of a 
 practice already disproportionately condemned 
 even in its worse aspects, and, as we have seen, 
 illogically and inequitably attacked in principle? 
 Let the reader judge for himself. It has been 
 sought in the foregoing pages to set forth the 
 main ethical aspects of the case, without going 
 into the technical question of the efficacy of vivi- 
 section. It has been assumed that we all detest 
 those acts of atrocious and almost maniacal 
 cruelty which are recorded of foreign vivisectors 
 and mostly repudiated by those of this country. 
 
222 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 But it has been assumed that there is a vivisection 
 which, whether or not well-judged, is not wanton ; 
 and it is the justifiability of that that has been con- 
 sidered. I have no hesitation in admitting that 
 the question is a difficult one : I rather insist on 
 the difficulty as against those who claim to settle 
 all moral questions offhand by their instincts ; and 
 I would fall back on my preliminary remarks on 
 that head. Dr. Kingsford tells us that *' The 
 Materialist [by which she means the non-Theist] 
 has no fundamental notion of Justice. For him 
 everything is vague, relative, inexplicable.'* I 
 leave it to the enquirer to judge whether the creed 
 of the Theist, with its good Almighty who never 
 gets his own way, but who yet fore-ordained all 
 things, supplies a ** fundamental notion of Jus- 
 tice '' ; or whether one is to be found in '* the 
 occult Book ^\ I have heard one of Dr. Kings- 
 ford's supporters propose to make it a misde- 
 meanor to kill dogs, but not to kill cats. There 
 is nothing *' vague *' or relative there ; but be- 
 tween such precision and Dr. Anna's ** occult " 
 teaching that by vivisection we forfeit our ** place 
 in the divine Order ", one is fain to stick to 
 ** Materialism*'. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 (1903.) 
 
 Since the foregoing essay was written, over 
 seventeen years ago, the progress of the entire 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 223 
 
 humanitarian movement has been towards a 
 higher level of consistency and of intellectual rec- 
 titude. As represented by the disinterested 
 labors of its excellent journal, The Humanitarian y 
 the Society of the same name draws no such 
 suicidal distinction as so many anti-vivisectionists 
 used to draw between vivisection and cruel 
 " sport ", but on the contrary makes a success- 
 ful warfare on the latter. I am not sure whether 
 the fallacious formula of " animals' rights '' is 
 still in vogue, as it still was ten years ago ; but 
 the stress of the argument is now rightly placed 
 by the agitators on the inutility of most if not of 
 all vivisection. 
 
 On this point it is now possible to come to a 
 fairly judicial conclusion. The attacks of anti- 
 vivisectionists have elicited an ostensibly systema- 
 tic reply in the volume entitled ' Experiments on 
 Animals ', by Stephen Paget, certificated by an 
 Introduction by Lord Lister* ; and an attentive 
 perusal of the case there set forth must impress 
 any impartial reader with the smallness and 
 vagueness of the residual claim for vivisection, 
 even on the view that the whole argument is 
 sound. Under * Experiments on Animals ' Mr. 
 Paget includes some that are not of the nature 
 of vivisection at all, such as feeding dogs pain- 
 lessly in different ways and then killing and dis- 
 secting them. 
 
 * Fisher Unwin, 1900. 
 
224 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 Nowhere does he seem to realise that there is 
 any total scientific or moral problem : that it is 
 necessary to make out some measurable propor- 
 tion between the enormous number of cruel ex- 
 periments on animals and the scientific results. 
 On his own showing- — if indeed he can be said to 
 show anything but an occasional glimpse of the 
 vast field of experimental torture — nine-tenths of 
 the vivisection of the past has been a mere vain 
 dabbling of the hands in blood, with an occa- 
 sional inconclusive coincidence of experiment and 
 discovery. Not once does he attempt to estimate 
 the proportion of such discoveries to the whole, 
 and so to settle the scientific problem of method. 
 
 In regard to some of the most important of the 
 problems handled by Mr. Paget there is no speci- 
 fic evidence whatever as to how the vivisection 
 practised afforded any assistance ; and in more 
 than one pase the compiler unconsciously gives 
 evidence which proves that the vivisection was 
 quite gratuitous, the necessary clues to the thera- 
 peutic discovery being all independently in exis- 
 tence. 
 
 This matter calls for detailed discussion, and I 
 will not attempt to deal with it at length in this 
 Postscript beyond pointing out how in the case of 
 myxoedema (in regard to which some of us had 
 been led to believe that the discovery of the thy- 
 roid treatment was solely made possible by the 
 experiments of Dr. Horsley on monkeys) Mr. 
 Paget 's own record shows that (i) the esential 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 225 
 
 facts were on record years before those experi- 
 ments began, and (2) that the therapeutic infer- 
 ence could perfectly well have been made from 
 those facts if the thinking processes of the 
 faculty kept place with their observations. And 
 on this it must be said that the Preface of Lord 
 Lister shows no more trace than does Mr. Paget 's 
 volume of the lesson which scientific men have to 
 learn from such records. His lordship, I regret 
 to say, has not even attempted to face the total 
 scientific problem. He takes for granted that the 
 professional case is inexpugnable, and that ** the 
 action of those well-meaning persons *' who at- 
 tack it ** is based upon ignorance *'. He pro- 
 ceeds, in short, exactly as does a bishop who pre- 
 ludes to a polemic upon Christian Evidences, or a 
 party leader who fathers a partisan pamphlet. 
 Not thus is the dignity of science to be conserved. 
 Her credentials are those of sheer truth, or noth- 
 ing ; and for her ** truth '' is something purer 
 than the flag of a professional controversy. 
 
 Certainly the way of science is hard, and when 
 Lord Lister is seen declining from it, the other 
 side in the discussion had need walk warily. And 
 I am compelled to except in turn, at the same 
 special point, to the brilliant dialectic of the Hon. 
 Mr. Stephen Coleridge. In his extremely clever 
 Open Letter to the Registrar-General he satirically 
 impeaches that official for publishing statistics 
 which show that there are now more deaths than 
 ever from those very maladies for which the doc- 
 
 Q 
 
226 Essays in Ethics, 
 
 tors claim to have found cures through vivisection; 
 and among other figures he instances the mor- 
 tality from myxcedema. Now, as the medical 
 journalists have indignantly shown, this argument 
 is only superficially valid. Twenty years ago the 
 very diagnosis of myxcedema was so little known 
 that its real prevalence is quite problematical ; 
 and on the other hand it is quite possible that the 
 disease has become more prevalent, though it is 
 now curable. The true issues are, whether the 
 disease is or is not actually curable by the new 
 treatment, and whether that treatment was dis- 
 covered solely through vivisection. On neither 
 of these issues does Mr. Coleridge offer a nega- 
 tive ; and so far the case goes against him by 
 default, though he might easily have won on the 
 second. 
 
 It would indeed be unjust to condemn Mr. 
 Coleridge for employing the special pleader's 
 method when that method is constantly employed 
 on the other side. The medical profession is so 
 generally and so uncritically committed to vindi- 
 cating vivisection through thick and thin that 
 forensic measures on the critical side are almost 
 inevitable. But it may be permitted to a dis- 
 passionate onlooker to suggest that the cause of 
 truth will gain from a reform of temper and tactic 
 on both sides ; and that the credit will lie mainly 
 with the side which begins. 
 
 There is no reason why that side should not be 
 the anti-vivisectionist. The brilliant intellectu- 
 
The Ethics of Vivisection. 227 
 
 ality of Mr. Coleridge's polemic might easily be 
 elevated to a quite judicial plane of inquiry ; and 
 on that plane — unless he and I are alike mistaken 
 — he might demonstrate (i) that at least a num- 
 ber of the claims made for vivisection are false, 
 and (2) that the reliance upon it has lamed physio- 
 logical science. The temper constantly shown by 
 medical journalists on this subject is alone suffi- 
 cient to rouse the latter suspicion ; so unscientific 
 is it, so passionate, so far from the calm alertness 
 of the true investigator. Even in the above- 
 noted dispute as to myxoedema, it will be seen, 
 the profession did not seem to know, until Mr. 
 Coleridge brought out the fact, that the disease 
 had been gaining ground on them despite the 
 cure. That is to say, they have apparently 
 neglected to study the primary causation of the 
 malady even when they had come to understand 
 its proximate causation. In the same way, what 
 knowledge is now available of the history and 
 nature of vaccinia is almost solely due to the re- 
 searches and pressures of anti-vaccinationists ; 
 and there has been absolutely no philosophic at- 
 tempt on the part of orthodox practitioners to 
 ascertain the reactions of vaccination apart from 
 its relation to smallpox. It would not be hard for 
 some anti-vivisectionists to be more scientific than 
 many of their opponents. 
 
 But I venture to repeat here what I have else- 
 where urged on my anti-vivisectionist friends, that 
 they might greatly further their cause by endow- 
 
228 Essays in Ethics. 
 
 ing a hig-h-class laboratory for physiological re- 
 search without vivisection. If they have faith in 
 their own denial of the utility of the practice, they 
 ought to do this if they can ; and they might 
 surely count on the zealous co-operation of stu- 
 dents whose sympathies are with them. Scien- 
 tific gains thus attained would be more persuasive 
 than much declamation. 
 
 Unfortunately there is in humanitarians as in 
 other people a primary proclivity to mere coercion 
 where coercion is not the method of true wisdom ; 
 and there ensues the absurd spectacle of a dead 
 set by some of them at the entire medical profes- 
 sion, which is only too generally ready to retaliate 
 in the normal manner by making a dead set at all 
 anti-vivisectionists and justifying all vivisection. 
 Both attitudes are the negation alike of science 
 and of sane morals. To love all dogs and hate all 
 doctors, as some do, is to make zoophily ridicu- 
 lous ; and to call all critics of vivisection evil 
 names, as even Huxley did, is to show the healer 
 in no better light than the typical priest. In the 
 light of the whole history of science, it is probably 
 quite safe to say that there is some truth on both 
 sides. But it is perhaps still safer to say, in view 
 of the temper shown all round, that on both sides 
 there is much error. Truth is hardly to be reached 
 while that temper prevails. 
 
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