In highly civilised ages the same spirit may be clearly traced. Bossuet was certainly no hypocrite or sycophant, but a man of austere virtue and undoubted courage. He did not hesitate to rebuke the gross profligacy of the life of Louis XIV., and although neither he nor any of the other Catholic divines of his age seriously protested against the wars of pure egotism and ostentation which made that sovereign the scourge of Europe and brought down upon his people calamities immeasurably greater than the faults of his private life—although, indeed, he has spoken of those wars in language of rapturous and unqualified eulogy[16]—he had at least the grace to devote a chapter of his 'Politique tiree de l'Ecriture Sainte' to the theme that 'God does not love war.' But in the eyes of Bossuet the dominant fact in the life of Louis XIV. was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the savage persecution of the Huguenots, and this was sufficient to place him among the best of sovereigns.[17]

To those who will candidly consider the subject there is nothing in this which need excite surprise. The doctrine that the Catholic Church is the inspired guide, representing the voice of the Divinity on earth and deciding with absolute authority all questions of right and wrong, very naturally led to the conviction that nothing which was conducive to its interests could be really criminal, and in all departments of morals it regulated the degrees of praise and blame. The doctrine which is still so widely professed but now so faintly realised, that the first essential to salvation is orthodox belief, placed conduct on a lower plane of importance than dogma, while the conviction that it is in the power of man to obtain absolute certainty in religious belief, that erroneous belief is in the eyes of the Almighty a crime bringing with it eternal damnation, and that the teacher of heresy is the greatest enemy of mankind, at once justified in the eyes of the believer acts which now seem the gravest moral aberrations. Many baser motives and elements no doubt mingled with the long and hideous history of the religious persecutions of Christendom, but in the eyes of countless conscientious men this teaching seemed amply sufficient to justify them and to stifle all feeling of compassion for the victims. Much the same considerations explain the absolute indifference with which so many good men witnessed those witch persecutions which consigned thousands of old, feeble and innocent women to torture and to death.

Other illustrations of a less tragical kind might be given. Thus in cases of child-birth the physician is sometimes placed in the alternative of sacrificing the life of the mother or of the unborn child. In such cases a Protestant or freethinking physician would not hesitate to save the adult life as by far the most valuable. The Catholic doctrine is that under such circumstances the first duty of the physician is to save the life of the unbaptized child.[18] Large numbers of commercial transactions which are now universally acknowledged to be perfectly innocent and useful would during a long period have been prohibited on account of the Catholic doctrine of usury which condemned as sinful even the most moderate interest on money if it was exacted as the price of the loan.[19]

Every religious and indeed every philosophical system that has played a great part in the history of the world has a tendency either to form or to assimilate with a particular moral type, and in the eyes of a large and growing number it is upon the excellency of this type, and upon its success in producing it, that its superiority mainly depends. The superstructure or scaffolding of belief around which it is formed appears to them of comparatively little moment, and it is not uncommon to find men ardently devoted to a particular type long after they have discarded the tenets with which it was once connected. Carlyle, for example, sometimes spoke of himself as a Calvinist, and used language both in public and private as if there was no important difference between himself and the most orthodox Puritans, yet it is very evident that he disbelieved nearly all the articles of their creed. What he meant was that Calvinism had produced in all countries in which it really dominated a definite type of character and conception of morals which was in his eyes the noblest that had yet appeared in the world.

'Above all things, my brethren, swear not.' If, as is generally assumed, this refers to the custom of using profane oaths in common conversation, how remote from modern ideas is the place assigned to this vice, which perhaps affects human happiness as little as any other that can be mentioned, in the scale of criminality, and how curiously characteristic is the fact that the vice to which this supremacy of enormity is attributed continued to be prevalent during the ages when theological influences were most powerful, and has in all good society faded away in simple obedience to a turn of fashion which proscribes it as ungentlemanly! For a long period Acts condemning it were read at stated periods in the churches,[20] and one of these described it as likely, by provoking God's wrath, to 'increase the many calamities these nations now labour under.' How curiously characteristic is the restriction in common usage of the term 'immoral' to a single vice, so that a man who is untruthful, selfish, cruel, or intemperate might still be said to have led 'a moral life' because he was blameless in the relations of the sexes! In the estimates of the character of public men the same disproportionate judgment may be constantly found in the comparative stress placed upon private faults and the most gigantic public crimes. Errors of judgment are not errors of morals, but any public man who, through selfish, ambitious, or party motives, plunges or helps to plunge his country into an unrighteous or unnecessary war, subordinates public interest to his personal ambition, employs himself in stimulating class, national, or provincial hatreds, lowers the moral standard of public life, or supports a legislation which he knows to tend to or facilitate dishonesty, is committing a crime before which, if it be measured by its consequences, the gravest acts of mere private immorality dwindle into insignificance. Yet how differently in the case of brilliant and successful politicians are such things treated in the judgment of contemporaries, and sometimes even in the judgments of history!

It is, I think, a peculiarity of modern times that the chief moral influences are much more various and complex than in the past. There is no such absolute empire as that which was exercised over character by the State in some periods of Pagan antiquity and by the Church during the Middle Ages. Our civilisation is more than anything else an industrial civilisation, and industrial habits are probably the strongest in forming the moral type to which public opinion aspires. Slavery, which threw a deep discredit on industry and on the qualities it fosters, has passed away. The feudal system, which placed industry in an inferior position, has been abolished, and the strong modern tendency to diminish both the privileges and the exclusiveness of rank and to increase the importance of wealth is in the same direction. An industrial society has its special vices and failings, but it naturally brings into the boldest relief the moral qualities which industry is most fitted to foster and on which it most largely depends, and it also gives the whole tone of moral thinking a utilitarian character. It is not Christianity but Industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilised nations.

Many other influences, however, have contributed to intensify, qualify, or impair the industrial type. Protestantism has disengaged primitive Christian ethics from a crowd of superstitious and artificial duties which had overlaid them, and a similar process has been going on in Catholic countries under the influence of the rationalising and sceptical spirit. The influence of dogmatic theology on Morals has declined. Out of the vast and complex religious systems of the past, an eclectic spirit is bringing into special and ever-increasing prominence those Christian virtues which are most manifestly in accordance with natural religion and most clearly conducive to the well-being of men upon the earth. Philanthropy or charity, which forms the centre of the system, has also been immensely intensified by increased knowledge and realisation of the wants and sorrows of others; by the sensitiveness to pain, by the softening of manners and the more humane and refined tastes and habits which a highly elaborated intellectual civilisation naturally produces. The sense of duty plays a great part in modern philanthropy, and lower motives of ostentation or custom mingle largely with the genuine kindliness of feeling that inspires it; but on the whole it is probable that men in our day, in doing good to others, look much more exclusively than in the past to the benefit of the recipient and much less to some reward for their acts in a future world. As long, too, as this benefit is attained, they will gladly diminish as much as possible the self-sacrifice it entails. An eminently characteristic feature of modern philanthropy is its close connection with amusements. There was a time when a great philanthropic work would be naturally supported by an issue of indulgences promising specific advantages in another world to all who took part in it. In our own generation balls, bazaars, theatrical or other amusements given for the benefit of the charity, occupy an almost corresponding place.

At the same time increasing knowledge, and especially the kind of knowledge which science gives, has in other ways largely affected our judgments of right and wrong. The mental discipline, the habits of sound and accurate reasoning, the distrust of mere authority and of untested assertions and traditions that science tends to produce, all stimulate the intellectual virtues, and science has done much to rectify the chart of life, pointing out more clearly the true conditions of human well-being and disclosing much baselessness and many errors in the teaching of the past. It cannot, however, be said that the civic or the military influences have declined. If the State does not hold altogether the same place as in Pagan antiquity, it is at least certain that in a democratic age public interests are enormously prominent in the lives of men, and there is a growing and dangerous tendency to aggrandise the influence of the State over the individual, while modern militarism is drawing the flower of Continental Europe into its circle and making military education one of the most powerful influences in the formation of characters and ideals.

I do not believe that the world will ever greatly differ about the essential elements of right and wrong. These things lie deep in human nature and in the fundamental conditions of human life. The changes that are taking place, and which seem likely to strengthen in the future, lie chiefly in the importance attached to different qualities.

What seems to be useless self-sacrifice and unnecessary suffering is as much as possible avoided. The strain of sentiment which valued suffering in itself as an expiatory thing, as a mode of following the Man of Sorrows, as a thing to be for its own sake embraced and dwelt upon, and prolonged, bears a very great part in some of the most beautiful Christian lives, and especially in those which were formed under the influence of the Catholic Church. An old legend tells how Christ once appeared as a Man of Sorrows to a Catholic Saint, and asked him what boon he would most desire. 'Lord,' was the reply, 'that I might suffer most.' This strain runs deeply through the whole ascetic literature and the whole monastic system of Catholicism, and outside Catholicism it has been sometimes shown by a reluctance to accept the aid of anaesthetics, which partially or wholly removed suffering supposed to have been sent by Providence. The history of the use of chloroform furnishes striking illustrations of this. Many of my readers may remember the French monks who devoted themselves to cultivating one of the most pestilential spots in the Roman Campagna, which was associated with an ecclesiastical legend, and who quite unnecessarily insisted on remaining there during the season when such a residence meant little less than a slow suicide. They had, as they were accustomed to say, their purgatory upon earth, and they remained till their constitutions were hopelessly shattered and they were sent to die in their own land. Touching examples might be found in modern times of men who, in the last extremes of disease or suffering, scrupled, through religious motives, about availing themselves of the simplest alleviations,[21] and something of the same feeling is shown in the desire to prolong to the last possible moment hopeless and agonising disease. All this is manifestly and rapidly disappearing. To endure with patience and resignation inevitable suffering; to encounter courageously dangers and suffering for some worthy and useful end, ranks, indeed, as high as it ever did in the ethics of the century, but suffering for its own sake is no longer valued, and it is deemed one of the first objects of a wise life to restrict and diminish it.

No one, I think, has seen more clearly or described more vividly than Goethe the direction in which in modern times the current of morals is flowing. His philosophy is a terrestrial philosophy, and the old theologians would have said that it allowed the second Table of the Law altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the wise use of all our powers the supreme ideal and end of our lives; to oppose labour and study to affliction and regret; to keep at a distance gloomy thoughts and exaggerated anxieties; 'to see the individual in connection and co-operation with the whole,' and to look upon effort and action as the main elements both of duty and happiness, was the lesson which he continually taught. 'The mind endowed with active powers, and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth.' 'Character consists in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable.' 'Try to do your duty and you will know what you are worth.' 'Piety is not an end but a means; a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul.' 'We are not born to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the problem begins and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp.'

To cultivate sincere love of truth and clear and definite conceptions, and divest ourselves as much as possible from prejudices, fanaticisms, superstitions, and exaggeration; to take wide, sound, tolerant, many-sided views of life, stands in his eyes in the forefront of ethics. 'Let it be your earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and reason;' 'remove by plain and honest purpose false, irrelevant and futile ideas.' 'The truest liberality is appreciation.' 'Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.'[22]

In the eyes of this school of thought one of the great vices of the old theological type of ethics was that it was unduly negative. It thought much more of the avoidance of sin than of the performance of duty. The more we advance in knowledge the more we shall come to judge men in the spirit of the parable of the talents; that is by the net result of their lives, by their essential unselfishness, by the degree in which they employ and the objects to which they direct their capacities and opportunities. The staple of moral life becomes much less a matter of small scruples, of minute self-examination, of extreme stress laid upon flaws of character and conduct that have little or no bearing upon active life. A life of idleness will be regarded with much less tolerance than at present. Men will grow less introspective and more objective, and useful action will become more and more the guiding principle of morals.

In theory this will probably be readily admitted, but every good observer will find that it involves a considerable change in the point of view. A life of habitual languor and idleness, with no faculties really cultivated, and with no result that makes a man missed when he has passed away, may be spent without any act which the world calls vicious, and is quite compatible with much charm of temper and demeanour and with a complete freedom from violent and aggressive selfishness. Such a life, in the eyes of many moralists, would rank much higher than a life of constant, honourable self-sacrificing labour for the good of others which was at the same time flawed by some positive vice. Yet the life which seems to be comparatively blameless has in truth wholly missed, while the other life, in spite of all its defects, has largely attained what should be the main object of a human life, the full development and useful employment of whatever powers we possess. There are men, indeed, in whom an over-sensitive conscience is even a paralysing thing, which by suggesting constant petty and ingenious scruples holds them back from useful action. It is a moral infirmity corresponding to that exaggerated intellectual fastidiousness which so often makes an intellectual life almost wholly barren, or to that excessive tendency to look on all sides of a question and to realise the dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments of difficulty paralyses the actions of public men. Sometimes, under the strange and subtle bias of the will, this excessive conscientiousness will be unconsciously fostered in inert and sluggish natures which are constitutionally disinclined to effort. The main lines of duty in the great relations of life are sufficiently obvious, and the casuistry which multiplies cases of conscience and invents unreal and factitious duties is apt to be rather an impediment than a furtherance to a noble life.

It is probable that as the world goes on morals will move more and more in the direction I have described. There will be at the same time a steadily increasing tendency to judge moral qualities and courses of conduct mainly by the degree in which they promote or diminish human happiness. Enthusiasm and self-sacrifice for some object which has no real bearing on the welfare of man will become rarer and will be less respected, and the condemnation that is passed on acts that are recognised as wrong will be much more proportioned than at present to the injury they inflict. Some things, such as excessive luxury of expenditure and the improvidence of bringing into the world children for whom no provision has been made, which can now scarcely be said to enter into the teaching of moralists, or at least of churches, may one day be looked upon as graver offences than some that are in the penal code.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] St. Francis de Sales.

[12] St. Philip Neri.

[13] St. Teresa.

[14] 'Cum dictus Johannes Hus fidem orthodoxam pertinaciter impugnans, se ab omni con ductu et privilegio reddiderit alienum, nec aliqua sibi fides aut promissio de jure naturali divino vel humano, fuerit in praejudicium Catholicae fidei observanda.' Declaration of the Council of Constance. See Creighton's History of the Papacy, ii. 32.

[15] I have collected some illustrations of this in my History of European Morals, ii. 235-242.

[16] See, e.g. his funeral oration on Marie Therese d'Autriche.

[17] See the enthusiastic eulogy of the persecution of the Huguenots in his funeral oration on Michel le Tellier. It concludes: 'Epanchons nos coeurs sur la piete de Louis; poussons jusqu'au ciel nos acclamations, et disons a ce nouveau Constantin, a ce nouveau Theodose, a ce nouveau Marcien, a ce nouveau Charlemagne ce que les six cent trente Peres dirent autrefois dans le Concile de Chalcedoine: "Vous avez affermi la foi; vous avez extermine les heretiques; c'est le digne ouvrage de votre regne; c'en est le propre caractere. Par vous l'heresie n'est plus, Dieu seul a pu faire cette merveille. Roi du ciel, conservez le roi de la terre; c'est le voeu, des Eglises; c'est le voeu des Eveques."'

[18] See Migne, Encyclopedie Theologique, 'Dict. de Cas de Conscience,' art. Avortement.

[19] See on this subject my History of Rationalism, ii. 250-270, and my Democracy and Liberty, ii., ch. viii.

[20] 21 James I. c. 20; 19 Geo. II. c. 21. The penalties, however, were fines, the pillory, or short periods of imprisonment. The obligation of reading the statute in churches was abolished in 1823, but the custom had before fallen into desuetude. In 1772 a vicar was (as an act of private vengeance) prosecuted and fined for having neglected to read it. (Annual Register, 1772, p. 115.)

[21] The following beautiful passage from a funeral sermon by Newman is an example: 'One should have thought that a life so innocent, so active, so holy, I might say so faultless from first to last, might have been spared the visitation of any long and severe penance to bring it to an end; but in order doubtless to show us how vile and miserable the best of us are in ourselves ... and moreover to give us a pattern how to bear suffering ourselves, and to increase the merits and to hasten and brighten the crown of this faithful servant of his Lord, it pleased Almighty God to send upon him a disorder which during the last six years fought with him, mastered him, and at length has destroyed him, so far, that is, as death now has power to destroy.... It is for those who came near him year after year to store up the many words and deeds of resignation, love and humility which that long penance elicited. These meritorious acts are written in the Book of Life, and they have followed him whither he is gone. They multiplied and grew in strength and perfection as his trial proceeded; and they were never so striking as at its close. When a friend visited him in the last week, he found he had scrupled at allowing his temples to be moistened with some refreshing waters, and had with difficulty been brought to give his consent; he said he feared it was too great a luxury. When the same friend offered him some liquid to allay his distressing thirst his answer was the same.'—Sermon at the funeral of the Right Rev. Henry Weedall, pp. 19, 20.

[22] See the excellent little book of Mr. Bailey Saunders, called The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.



CHAPTER VI

The tendency to regard morals rather in their positive than their negative aspects, and to estimate men by the good they do in the world, is a healthy element in modern life. A strong sense of the obligation of a full, active, and useful life is the best safeguard both of individual and national morals at a time when the dissolution or enfeeblement of theological beliefs is disturbing the foundations on which most current moral teaching has been based. In the field of morals action holds a much larger place than reasoning—a larger place even in elucidating our difficulties and illuminating the path on which we should go. It is by the active pursuit of an immediate duty that the vista of future duties becomes most clear, and those who are most immersed in active duties are usually little troubled with the perplexities of life, or with minute and paralysing scruples. A public opinion which discourages idleness and places high the standard of public duty is especially valuable in an age when the tendency to value wealth, and to measure dignity by wealth, has greatly increased, and when wealth in some of its most important forms has become wholly dissociated from special duties. The duties of the landlord who is surrounded by a poor and in some measure dependent tenantry, the duties of the head of a great factory or shop who has a large number of workmen or dependents in his employment, are sufficiently obvious, though even in these spheres the tie of duty has been greatly relaxed by the growing spirit of independence, which makes each class increasingly jealous of the interference of others, and by the growing tendency of legislation to regulate all relations of business and contracts by definite law instead of leaving them, as in the past, to voluntary action. But there are large classes of fortunes which are wholly, or almost wholly, dissociated from special and definite duties. The vast and ever-increasing multitude whose incomes are derived from national, or provincial, or municipal debts, or who are shareholders or debenture-holders in great commercial and industrial undertakings, have little or no practical control over, or interest in, those from whom their fortunes are derived. The multiplication of such fortunes is one of the great characteristics of our time, and it brings with it grave dangers. Such fortunes give unrivalled opportunities of luxurious idleness, and as in themselves they bring little or no social influence or position, those who possess them are peculiarly tempted to seek such a position by an ostentation of wealth and luxury which has a profoundly vulgarising and demoralising influence upon Society. The tendency of idleness to lead to immorality has long been a commonplace of moralists. Perhaps our own age has seen more clearly than those that preceded it that complete and habitual idleness is immorality, and that when the circumstances of his life do not assign to a man a definite sphere of work it is his first duty to find it for himself. It has been happily said that in the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria young men in England who were really busy affected idleness, and at the close of the reign young men who are really idle pretend to be busy. In my own opinion, a disproportionate amount of English energy takes political forms, and there is a dangerous exaggeration in the prevailing tendency to combat all social and moral abuses by Acts of Parliament. But there are multitudes of other and less obtrusive spheres of work adapted to all grades of intellect and to many types of character, in which men who possess the inestimable boon of leisure can find abundant and useful fields for the exercise of their powers.

The rectification of moral judgments is one of the most important elements of civilisation; it is upon this that the possibility of moral progress on a large scale chiefly depends. Few things pervert men more than the habit of regarding as enviable persons or qualities injurious to Society. The most obvious example is the passionate admiration bestowed on a brilliant conqueror, which is often quite irrespective of the justice of his wars and of the motives that actuated him. This false moral feeling has acquired such a strength that overwhelming military power almost certainly leads to a career of ambition. Perverted public opinion is the main cause. Glory, not interest, is the lure, or at least the latter would be powerless if it were not accompanied by the former—if the execration of mankind naturally followed unscrupulous aggression.

Another and scarcely less flagrant instance of the worship of false ideals is to be found in the fierce competition of luxury and ostentation which characterises the more wealthy cities of Europe and America. It is no exaggeration to say that in a single festival in London or New York sums are often expended in the idlest and most ephemeral ostentation which might have revived industry, or extinguished pauperism, or alleviated suffering over a vast area. The question of expenditure on luxuries is no doubt a question of degree which cannot be reduced to strict rule, and there are many who will try to justify the most ostentatious expenditure on the ground of the employment it gives and of other incidental advantages it is supposed to produce. But nothing in political economy is more certain than that the vast and ever-increasing expenditure on the luxury of ostentation in modern societies, by withdrawing great masses of capital from productive labour, is a grave economical evil, and there is probably no other form of expenditure which, in proportion to its amount, gives so little real pleasure and confers so little real good. Its evil in setting up material and base standards of excellence, in stimulating the worst passions that grow out of an immoderate love of wealth, in ruining many who are tempted into a competition which they are unable to support, can hardly be overrated. It is felt in every rank in raising the standard of conventional expenses, excluding from much social intercourse many who are admirably fitted to adorn it, and introducing into all society a lower and more material tone. Nor are these its only consequences. Wealth which is expended in multiplying and elaborating real comforts, or even in pleasures which produce enjoyment at all proportionate to their cost, will never excite serious indignation. It is the colossal waste of the means of human happiness in the most selfish and most vulgar forms of social advertisement and competition that gives a force and almost a justification to anarchical passions which menace the whole future of our civilisation. It is such things that stimulate class hatreds and deepen class divisions, and if the law of opinion does not interfere to check them they will one day bring down upon the society that encourages them a signal and well-merited retribution.

A more recognised, though probably not really more pernicious example of false ideals, is to be found in the glorification of the demi-monde, which is so conspicuous in some societies and literatures. In a healthy state of opinion, the public, ostentatious appearance of such persons, without any concealment of their character, in the great concourse of fashion and among the notabilities of the State, would appear an intolerable scandal, and it becomes much worse when they give the tone to fashion and become the centres and the models of large and by no means undistinguished sections of Society. The evils springing from this public glorification of the class are immeasurably greater than the evils arising from its existence. The standard of popular morals is debased. Temptation in its most seductive form is forced upon inflammable natures, and the most pernicious of all lessons is taught to poor, honest, hard-working women. It is indeed wonderful that in societies where this evil prevails so much virtue should still exist among graceful, attractive women of the shopkeeping and servant class when they continually see before them members of their own class, by preferring vice to virtue, rising at once to wealth, luxury and idleness, and even held up as objects of admiration or imitation.

In judging wisely the characters of men, one of the first things to be done is to understand their ideals. Try to find out what kind of men or of life; what qualities, what positions seem to them the most desirable. Men do not always fully recognise their own ideals, for education and the conventionalities of Society oblige them to assert a preference for that which may really have no root in their minds. But by a careful examination it is usually possible to ascertain what persons or qualities or circumstances or gifts exercise a genuine, spontaneous, magnetic power over them—whether they really value supremely rank or position, or money, or beauty, or intellect, or superiority of character. If you know the ideal of a man you have obtained a true key to his nature. The broad lines of his character, the permanent tendencies of his imagination, his essential nobility or meanness, are thus disclosed more effectually than by any other means. A man with high ideals, who admires wisely and nobly, is never wholly base though he may fall into great vices. A man who worships the baser elements is in truth an idolater though he may have never bowed before an image of stone.

The human mind has much more power of distinguishing between right and wrong, and between true and false, than of estimating with accuracy the comparative gravity of opposite evils. It is nearly always right in judging between right and wrong. It is generally wrong in estimating degrees of guilt, and the root of its error lies in the extreme difficulty of putting ourselves into the place of those whose characters or circumstances are radically different from our own. This want of imagination acts widely on our judgment of what is good as well as of what is bad. Few men have enough imagination to realise types of excellence altogether differing from their own. It is this, much more than vanity, that leads them to esteem the types of excellence to which they themselves approximate as the best, and tastes and habits that are altogether incongruous with their own as futile and contemptible. It is, perhaps, most difficult of all to realise the difference of character and especially of moral sensibility produced by a profound difference of circumstances. This difficulty largely falsifies our judgments of the past, and it is the reason why a powerful imagination enabling us to realise very various characters and very remote circumstances is one of the first necessities of a great historian. Historians rarely make sufficient allowance for the degree in which the judgments and dispositions even of the best men are coloured by the moral tone of the time, society and profession in which they lived. Yet it is probable that on the whole we estimate more justly the characters of the past than of the present. No one would judge the actions of Charlemagne or of his contemporaries by the strict rules of nineteenth-century ethics. We feel that though they committed undoubted crimes, these crimes are at least indefinitely less heinous than they would have been under the wholly different circumstances and moral atmosphere of our own day. Yet we seldom apply this method of reasoning to the different strata of the same society. Men who have been themselves brought up amid all the comforts and all the moralising and restraining influences of a refined society, will often judge the crimes of the wretched pariahs of civilisation as if their acts were in no degree palliated by their position. They say to themselves 'How guilty should I have been if I had done this thing,' and their verdict is quite just according to this statement of the case. They realise the nature of the act. They utterly fail to realise the character and circumstances of the actor.

And yet it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the difference between the position of such a critic and that of the children of drunken, ignorant and profligate parents, born to abject poverty in the slums of our great cities. From their earliest childhood drunkenness, blasphemy, dishonesty, prostitution, indecency of every form are their most familiar experiences. All the social influences, such as they are, are influences of vice. As they grow up Life seems to them to present little more than the alternative of hard, ill-paid, and at the same time precarious labour, probably ending in the poor-house, or crime with its larger and swifter gains, and its intervals of coarse pleasure probably, though not certainly, followed by the prison or an early death. They see indeed, like figures in a dream, or like beings of another world, the wealthy and the luxurious spending their wealth and their time in many kinds of enjoyment, but to the very poor pleasure scarcely comes except in the form of the gin palace or perhaps the low music hall. And in many cases they have come into this reeking atmosphere of temptation and vice with natures debased and enfeebled by a long succession of vicious hereditary influences, with weak wills, with no faculties of mind or character that can respond to any healthy ambition; with powerful inborn predispositions to evil. The very mould of their features, the very shape of their skulls, marks them out as destined members of the criminal class. Even here, no doubt, there is a difference between right and wrong; there is scope for the action of free will; there are just causes of praise and blame, and Society rightly protects itself by severe penalties against the crimes that are most natural; but what human judge can duly measure the scale of moral guilt? or what comparison can there be between the crimes that are engendered by such circumstances and those which spring up in the homes of refined and well-regulated comfort?

Nor indeed even in this latter case is a really accurate judgment possible. Men are born into the world with both wills and passions of varying strength, though in mature life the strength or weakness of each is largely due to their own conduct. With different characters the same temptation, operating under the same external circumstances, has enormously different strength, and very few men can fully realise the strength of a passion which they have never themselves experienced. To repeat an illustration I have already used, how difficult is it for a constitutionally sober man to form in his own mind an adequate conception of the force of the temptation of drink to a dipsomaniac, or for a passionless man to conceive rightly the temptations of a profoundly sensual nature! I have spoken in a former chapter of the force with which bodily conditions act upon happiness. Their influence on morals is not less terrible. There are diseases well known to physicians which make the most placid temper habitually irritable; give a morbid turn to the healthiest disposition; fill the purest mind with unholy thoughts. There are others which destroy the force of the strongest will and take from character all balance and self-control.[23] It often happens that we have long been blaming a man for manifest faults of character till at last suicide, or the disclosure of some grave bodily or mental disease which has long been working unperceived, explains his faults and turns our blame into pity. In madness the whole moral character is sometimes reversed, and tendencies which have been in sane life dormant or repressed become suddenly supreme. In such cases we all acknowledge that there is no moral responsibility, but madness, with its illusions and irresistible impulses, and idiocy with its complete suspension of the will and of the judgment, are neither of them, as lawyers would pretend, clearly defined states, marked out by sharp and well-cut boundaries, wholly distinct from sanity. There are incipient stages; there are gradual approximations; there are twilight states between sanity and insanity which are clearly recognised not only by experts but by all sagacious men of the world. There are many who are not sufficiently mad to be shut up, or to be deprived of the management of their properties, or to be exempted from punishment if they have committed a crime, but who, in the common expressive phrase, 'are not all there'—whose eccentricities, illusions and caprices are on the verge of madness, whose judgments are hopelessly disordered; whose wills, though not completely atrophied, are manifestly diseased. In questions of property, in questions of crime, in questions of family arrangements, such persons cause the gravest perplexity, nor will any wise man judge them by the same moral standard as well-balanced and well-developed natures.

The inference to be drawn from such facts is certainly not that there is no such thing as free will and personal responsibility, nor yet that we have no power of judging the acts of others and distinguishing among our fellowmen between the good and the bad. The true lesson is the extreme fallibility of our moral judgments whenever we attempt to measure degrees of guilt. Sometimes men are even unjust to their own past from their incapacity in age of realising the force of the temptations they had experienced in youth. On the other hand, increased knowledge of the world tends to make us more sensible of the vast differences between the moral circumstances of men, and therefore less confident and more indulgent in our judgments of others. There are men whose cards in life are so bad, whose temptations to vice, either from circumstances or inborn character, seem so overwhelming, that, though we may punish, and in a certain sense blame, we can scarcely look on them as more responsible than some noxious wild beast. Among the terrible facts of life none is indeed more terrible than this. Every believer in the wise government of the world must have sometimes realised with a crushing or at least a staggering force the appalling injustices of life as shown in the enormous differences in the distribution of unmerited happiness and misery. But the disparity of moral circumstances is not less. It has shaken the faith of many. It has even led some to dream of a possible Heaven for the vicious where those who are born into the world with a physical constitution rendering them fierce or cruel, or sensual, or cowardly, may be freed from the nature which was the cause of their vice and their suffering upon earth; where due allowance may be made for the differences of circumstances which have plunged one man deeper and ever deeper into crime, and enabled another, who was not really better or worse, to pass through life with no serious blemish, and to rise higher and higher in the moral scale.

Imperfect, however, as is our power of judging others, it is a power we are all obliged to exercise. It is impossible to exclude the considerations of moral guilt and of palliating or aggravating circumstances from the penal code, and from the administration of justice, though it cannot be too clearly maintained that the criminal code is not coextensive with the moral code, and that many things which are profoundly immoral lie beyond its scope. On the whole it should be as much as possible confined to acts by which men directly injure others. In the case of adult men, private vices, vices by which no one is directly affected, except by his own free will, and in which the elements of force or fraud are not present, should not be brought within its range. This ideal, it is true, cannot be fully attained. The legislator must take into account the strong pressure of public opinion. It is sometimes true that a penal law may arrest, restrict, or prevent the revival of some private vice without producing any countervailing evil. But the presumption is against all laws which punish the voluntary acts of adult men when those acts injure no one except themselves. The social censure, or the judgment of opinion, rightly extends much further, though it is often based on very imperfect knowledge or realisation. It is probable that, on the whole, opinion judges too severely the crimes of passion and of drink, as well as those which spring from the pressure of great poverty and are accompanied by great ignorance. The causes of domestic anarchy are usually of such an intimate nature and involve so many unknown or imperfectly realised elements of aggravation or palliation that in most cases the less men attempt to judge them the better. On the other hand, public opinion is usually far too lenient in judging crimes of ambition, cupidity, envy, malevolence, and callous selfishness; the crimes of ill-gotten and ill-used wealth, especially in the many cases in which those crimes are unpunished by law.

It is a mere commonplace of morals that in the path of evil it is the first step that costs the most. The shame, the repugnance, and the remorse which attend the first crime speedily fade, and on every repetition the habit of evil grows stronger. A process of the same kind passes over our judgments. Few things are more curious than to observe how the eye accommodates itself to a new fashion of dress, however unbecoming; how speedily men, or at least women, will adopt a new and artificial standard and instinctively and unconsciously admire or blame according to this standard and not according to any genuine sense of beauty or the reverse. Few persons, however pure may be their natural taste, can live long amid vulgar and vulgarising surroundings without losing something of the delicacy of their taste and learning to accept—if not with pleasure, at least with acquiescence—things from which under other circumstances they would have recoiled. In the same way, both individuals and societies accommodate themselves but too readily to lower moral levels, and a constant vigilance is needed to detect the forms or directions in which individual and national character insensibly deteriorate.

FOOTNOTE:

[23] See Ribot, Les Maladies de la Volonte, pp. 92, 116-119.



CHAPTER VII

It is impossible for a physician to prescribe a rational regimen for a patient unless he has formed some clear conception of the nature of his constitution and of the morbid influences to which it is inclined; and in judging the wisdom of various proposals for the management of character we are at once met by the initial controversy about the goodness or the depravity of human nature. It is a subject on which extreme exaggerations have prevailed. The school of Rousseau, which dominated on the Continent in the last half of the eighteenth century, represented mankind as a being who comes into existence essentially good, and it attributed all the moral evils of the world, not to any innate tendencies to vice, but to superstition, vicious institutions, misleading education, a badly organised society. It is an obvious criticism that if human nature had been as good as such writers imagined, these corrupt and corrupting influences could never have grown up, or at least could never have obtained a controlling influence, and this philosophy became greatly discredited when the French Revolution, which it did so much to produce, ended in the unspeakable horrors of the Reign of Terror and in the gigantic carnage of the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, there are large schools of theologians who represent man as utterly and fundamentally depraved, 'born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by himself of doing good;' totally wrecked and ruined as a moral being by the catastrophe in Eden. There are also moral philosophers—usually very unconnected with theology—who deny or explain away all unselfish elements in human nature, represent man as simply governed by self-interest, and maintain that the whole art of education and government consists of a judicious arrangement of selfish motives, making the interests of the individual coincident with those of his neighbours. It is not too much to say that Society never could have subsisted if this view of human nature had been a just one. The world would have been like a cage-full of wild beasts, and mankind would have soon perished in constant internecine war.

It is indeed one of the plainest facts of human nature that such a view of mankind is an untrue one. Jealousy, envy, animosities and selfishness no doubt play a great part in life and disguise themselves under many specious forms, and the cynical moralist was not wholly wrong when he declared that 'Virtue would not go so far if Vanity did not keep her company,' and that not only our crimes but even many of what are deemed our best acts may be traced to selfish motives. But he must have had a strangely unfortunate experience of the world who does not recognise the enormous exaggeration of the pictures of human nature that are conveyed in some of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld and Schopenhauer. They tell us that friendship is a mere exchange of interests in which each man only seeks to gain something from the other; that most women are only pure because they are untempted and regret that the temptation does not come; that if we acknowledge some faults it is in order to persuade ourselves that we have no greater ones, or in order, by our confession, to regain the good opinion of our neighbours; that if we praise another it is merely that we may ourselves in turn be praised; that the tears we shed over a deathbed, if they are not hypocritical tears intended only to impress our neighbours, are only due to our conviction that we have ourselves lost a source of pleasure or of gain; that envy so predominates in the world that it is only men of inferior intellect or women of inferior beauty who are sincerely liked by those about them; that all virtue is an egotistic calculation, conscious or unconscious.

Such views are at least as far removed from truth as the roseate pictures of Rousseau and St. Pierre. No one can look with an unjaundiced eye upon the world without perceiving the enormous amount of disinterested, self-sacrificing benevolence that pervades it; the countless lives that are spent not only harmlessly and inoffensively but also in the constant discharge of duties; in constant and often painful labour for the good of others. The better section of the Utilitarian school has fully recognised the truth that human nature is so constituted that a great proportion of its enjoyment depends on sympathy; or, in other words, on the power we possess of entering into and sharing the happiness of others. The spectacle of suffering naturally elicits compassion. Kindness naturally produces gratitude. The sympathies of men naturally move on the side of the good rather than of the bad. This is true not only of the things that immediately concern us, but also in the perfectly disinterested judgments we form of the events of history or of the characters in fiction and poetry. Great exhibitions of heroism and self-sacrifice touch a genuine chord of enthusiasm. The affections of the domestic circle are the rule and not the exception; patriotism can elicit great outbursts of purely unselfish generosity and induce multitudes to risk or sacrifice their lives for causes which are quite other than their own selfish interests. Human nature indeed has its moral as well as its physical needs, and naturally and instinctively seeks some object of interest and enthusiasm outside itself.

If we look again into the vice and sin that undoubtedly disfigure the world we shall find much reason to believe that what is exceptional in human nature is not the evil tendency but the restraining conscience, and that it is chiefly the weakness of the distinctively human quality that is the origin of the evil. It is impossible indeed, with the knowledge we now possess, to deny to animals some measure both of reason and of the moral sense. In addition to the higher instincts of parental affection and devotion which are so clearly developed we find among some animals undoubted signs of remorse, gratitude, affection, self-sacrifice. Even the point of honour which attaches shame to some things and pride to others may be clearly distinguished. No one who has watched the more intelligent dog can question this, and many will maintain that in some animals, though both good and bad qualities are less widely developed than in man, the proportion of the good to the evil is more favourable in the animal than in the man. At the same time in the animal world desire is usually followed without any other restraint than fear, while in man it is largely though no doubt very imperfectly limited by moral self-control. Most crimes spring not from anything wrong in the original and primal desire but from the imperfection of this higher, distinct or superadded element in our nature. The crimes of dishonesty and envy, when duly analysed, have at their basis simply a desire for the desirable—a natural and inevitable feeling. What is absent is the restraint which makes men refrain from taking or trying to take desirable things that belong to another. Sensual faults spring from a perfectly natural impulse, but the restraint which confines the action of that impulse to defined circumstances is wanting. Much, too, of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to a simple want of imagination which prevents us from adequately realising the sufferings of others. The predatory, envious and ferocious feelings that disturb mankind operate unrestrained through the animal world, though man's superior intelligence gives his desires a special character and a greatly increased scope, and introduces them into spheres inconceivable to the animal. Immoderate and uncontrolled desires are the root of most human crimes, but at the same time the self-restraint that limits desire, or self-seeking, by the rights of others, seems to be mainly, though not wholly, the prerogative of man.

Considerations of this kind are sufficient to remedy the extreme exaggeration of human corruption that may often be heard, but they are not inconsistent with the truth that human nature is so far depraved that it can never be safely left to develop unimpeded without strong legal and social restraint. It is not necessary to seek examples of its depravity within the precincts of a prison or in the many instances that may be found outside the criminal population of morbid moral taints which are often as clearly marked as physical disease. On a large scale and in the actions of great bodies of men the melancholy truth is abundantly displayed. On the whole Christianity has been far more successful in influencing individuals than societies. The mere spectacle of a battle-field with the appalling mass of hideous suffering deliberately and ingeniously inflicted by man upon man should be sufficient to scatter all idyllic pictures of human nature. It was once the custom of a large school of writers to attribute unjust wars solely to the rulers of the world, who for their own selfish ambitions remorselessly sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of their subjects. Their guilt has been very great, but they would never have pursued the course of ambitious conquest if the applause of nations had not followed and encouraged them, and there are no signs that democracy, which has enthroned the masses, has any real tendency to diminish war.

In modern times the danger of war lies less in the intrigues of statesmen than in deeply seated international jealousies and antipathies; in sudden, volcanic outbursts of popular passion. After eighteen hundred years' profession of the creed of peace, Christendom is an armed camp. Never, or hardly ever, in times of peace had the mere preparations of war absorbed so large a proportion of its population and resources, and very seldom has so large an amount of its ability been mainly employed in inventing and in perfecting instruments of destruction. Those who will look on the world without illusion will be compelled to admit that the chief guarantees for its peace are to be found much less in moral than in purely selfish motives. The financial embarrassments of the great nations; their profound distrust of one another; the vast cost of modern war; the gigantic commercial disasters it inevitably entails; the extreme uncertainty of its issue; the utter ruin that may follow defeat—these are the real influences that restrain the tiger passions and the avaricious cravings of mankind. It is also one of the advantages that accompany the many evils of universal service, that great citizen armies who in time of war are drawn from their homes, their families, and their peaceful occupations have not the same thirst for battle that grows up among purely professional soldiers, voluntarily enlisted and making a military life their whole career. Yet, in spite of all this, what trust could be placed in the forbearance of Christian nations if the path of aggression was at once easy, lucrative and safe? The judgments of nations in dealing with the aggressions of their neighbours are, it is true, very different from those which they form of aggressions by their own statesmen or for their own benefit. But no great nation is blameless, and there is probably no nation that could not speedily catch the infection of the warlike spirit if a conqueror and a few splendid victories obscured, as they nearly always do, the moral issues of the contest.

War, it is true, is not always or wholly evil. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. Sometimes it is professedly and in part really due to some strong wave of philanthropic feeling produced by great acts of wrong, though of all forms of philanthropy it is that which most naturally defeats itself. Even when unjustifiable, it calls into action splendid qualities of courage, self-sacrifice, and endurance which cast a dazzling and deceptive glamour over its horrors and its criminality. It appeals too, beyond all other things, to that craving for excitement, adventure, and danger which is an essential and imperious element in human nature, and which, while it is in itself neither a virtue nor a vice, blends powerfully with some of the best as well as with some of the worst actions of mankind. It is indeed a strange thing to observe how many men in every age have been ready to risk or sacrifice their lives for causes which they have never clearly understood and which they would find it difficult in plain words to describe.

But the amount of pure and almost spontaneous malevolence in the world is probably far greater than we at first imagine. In public life the workings of this side of human nature are at once disclosed and magnified, like the figures thrown by a magic lantern on a screen, to a scale which it is impossible to overlook. No one, for example, can study the anonymous press without perceiving how large a part of it is employed systematically, persistently and deliberately in fostering class, or race, or international hatreds, and often in circulating falsehoods to attain this end. Many newspapers notoriously depend for their existence on such appeals, and more than any other instruments they inflame and perpetuate those permanent animosities which most endanger the peace of mankind. The fact that such newspapers are becoming in many countries the main and almost exclusive reading of the poor forms the most serious deduction from the value of popular education. How many books have attained popularity, how many seats in Parliament have been won, how many posts of influence and profit have been attained, how many party victories have been achieved, by appealing to such passions! Often they disguise themselves under the lofty names of patriotism and nationality, and men whose whole lives have been spent in sowing class hatreds and dividing kindred nations may be found masquerading under the name of patriots, and have played no small part on the stage of politics. The deep-seated sedition, the fierce class and national hatreds that run through European life would have a very different intensity from what they now unfortunately have if they had not been artificially stimulated and fostered through purely selfish motives by demagogues, political adventurers and public writers.

Some of the very worst acts of which man can be guilty are acts which are commonly untouched by law and only faintly censured by opinion. Political crimes which a false and sickly sentiment so readily condones are conspicuous among them. Men who have been gambling for wealth and power with the lives and fortunes of multitudes; men who for their own personal ambition are prepared to sacrifice the most vital interests of their country; men who in time of great national danger and excitement deliberately launch falsehood after falsehood in the public press in the well-founded conviction that they will do their evil work before they can be contradicted, may be met shameless, and almost uncensured, in Parliaments and drawing-rooms. The amount of false statement in the world which cannot be attributed to mere carelessness, inaccuracy, or exaggeration, but which is plainly both deliberate and malevolent, can hardly be overrated. Sometimes it is due to a mere desire to create a lucrative sensation, or to gratify a personal dislike, or even to an unprovoked malevolence which takes pleasure in inflicting pain.

Very often it is intended for purposes of stockjobbing. The financial world is percolated with it. It is the common method of raising or depreciating securities, attracting investors, preying upon the ignorant and credulous, and enabling dishonest men to rise rapidly to fortune. When the prospect of speedy wealth is in sight, there are always numbers who are perfectly prepared to pursue courses involving the utter ruin of multitudes, endangering the most serious international interests, perhaps bringing down upon the world all the calamities of war. It is no doubt true that such men are only a minority, though it is less certain that they would be a minority if the opportunity of obtaining sudden riches by immoral means was open to all, and it is no small minority who are accustomed to condone these crimes when they have succeeded. It is much to be questioned whether the greatest criminals are to be found within the walls of prisons. Dishonesty on a small scale nearly always finds its punishment. Dishonesty on a gigantic scale continually escapes. The pickpocket and the burglar seldom fail to meet with their merited punishment, but in the management of companies, in the great fields of industrial enterprise and speculation, gigantic fortunes are acquired by the ruin of multitudes and by methods which, though they evade legal penalties, are essentially fraudulent. In the majority of cases these crimes are perpetrated by educated men who are in possession of all the necessaries, of most of the comforts, and of many of the luxuries of life, and some of the worst of them are powerfully favoured by the conditions of modern civilisation. There is no greater scandal or moral evil in our time than the readiness with which public opinion excuses them, and the influence and social position it accords to mere wealth, even when it has been acquired by notorious dishonesty or when it is expended with absolute selfishness or in ways that are positively demoralising. In many respects the moral progress of mankind seems to me incontestable, but it is extremely doubtful whether in this respect social morality, especially in England and America, has not seriously retrograded.

In truth, while it is a gross libel upon human nature to deny the vast amount of genuine kindness, self-sacrifice and even heroism that exists in the world, it is equally idle to deny the deplorable weakness of self-restraint, the great force and the widespread influence of purely evil passions in the affairs of men. The distrust of human character which the experience of life tends to produce is one great cause of the Conservatism which so commonly strengthens with age. It is more and more felt that all the restraints of law, custom, and religion are essential to hold together in peaceful co-operation the elements of society, and men learn to look with increasing tolerance on both institutions and opinions which cannot stand the test of pure reason and may be largely mixed with delusions if only they deepen the better habits and give an additional strength to moral restraints. They learn also to appreciate the danger of pitching their ideals too high, and endeavouring to enforce lines of conduct greatly above the average level of human goodness. Such attempts, when they take the form of coercive action, seldom fail to produce a recoil which is very detrimental to morals. In this, as in all other spheres, the importance of compromise in practical life is one of the great lessons which experience teaches.



CHAPTER VIII

The phrase Moral Compromise has an evil sound, and it opens out questions of practical ethics which are very difficult and very dangerous, but they are questions with which, consciously or unconsciously, every one is obliged to deal. The contrasts between the rigidity of theological formulae and actual life are on this subject very great, though in practice, and by the many ingenious subtleties that constitute the science of casuistry, many theologians have attempted to evade them. A striking passage from the pen of Cardinal Newman will bring these contrasts into the clearest light. 'The Church holds,' he writes, 'that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse.'[24]

It is certainly no exaggeration to say that such a doctrine would lead to consequences absolutely incompatible with any life outside a hermitage or a monastery. It would strike at the root of all civilisation, and although many may be prepared to give it their formal assent, no human being actually believes it with the kind of belief that becomes a guiding influence in life. I have dwelt on this subject in another book, and may here repeat a few lines which I then wrote. If 'an undoubted sin, even the most trivial, is a thing in its essence and its consequences so unspeakably dreadful that rather than it should be committed it would be better that any amount of calamity which did not bring with it sin should be endured, even that the whole human race should perish in agonies, it is manifest that the supreme object of humanity should be sinlessness, and it is equally manifest that the means to this end is the absolute suppression of the desires. To expand the circle of wants is necessarily to multiply temptations and therefore to increase the number of sins.' No material and intellectual advantages, no increase of human happiness, no mitigation of the suffering or dreariness of human life can, according to this theory, be other than an evil if it adds even in the smallest degree or in the most incidental manner to the sins that are committed. 'A sovereign, when calculating the consequences of a war, should reflect that a single sin occasioned by that war, a single blasphemy of a wounded soldier, the robbery of a single hen-coop, the violation of the purity of a single woman is a greater calamity than the ruin of the entire commerce of his nation, the loss of her most precious provinces, the destruction of all her power. He must believe that the evil of the increase of unchastity which invariably results from the formation of an army is an immeasurably greater calamity than any national or political disasters that army can possibly avert. He must believe that the most fearful plagues and famines that desolate his land should be regarded as a matter of rejoicing if they have but the feeblest and most transient influence in repressing vice. He must believe that if the agglomeration of his people in great cities adds but one to the number of their sins, no possible intellectual or material advantages can prevent the construction of cities being a fearful calamity. According to this principle every elaboration of life, every amusement that brings multitudes together, almost every art, every accession of wealth, that awakens or stimulates desires is an evil, for all these become the sources of some sins, and their advantages are for the most part purely terrestrial.'

Considerations of this kind, if duly realised, bring out clearly the insincerity and the unreality of much of our professed belief. Hardly any sane man would desire to suppress Bank Holidays simply because they are the occasion of a considerable number of cases of drunkenness which would not otherwise have taken place. No humane legislator would hesitate to suppress them if they produced an equal number of deaths or other great physical calamities. This manner of measuring the relative importance of things is not incompatible with a general acknowledgment of the fact that there are many amusements which produce an amount of moral evil that overbalances their advantages as sources of pleasure, or of the great truth that the moral is the higher and ought to be the ruling part of our being. But the realities of life cannot be measured by rigid theological formulae. Life is a scene in which different kinds of interest not only blend but also modify and in some degree counterbalance one another, and it can only be carried on by constant compromises in which the lines of definition are seldom very clearly marked, and in which even the highest interest must not altogether absorb or override the others. We have to deal with good principles that cannot be pushed to their full logical results; with varying standards which cannot be brought under inflexible law.

Take, for example, the many untruths which the conventional courtesies of Society prescribe. Some of these are so purely matter of phraseology that they deceive no one. Others chiefly serve the purpose of courteous concealment, as when they enable us to refuse a request or to decline an invitation or a visit without disclosing whether disinclination or inability is the cause. Then there are falsehoods for useful purposes. Few men would shrink from a falsehood which was the only means of saving a patient from a shock which would probably produce his death. No one, I suppose, would hesitate to deceive a criminal if by no other means he could prevent him from accomplishing a crime. There are also cases of the suppression of what we believe to be true, and of tacit or open acquiescence in what we believe to be false, when a full and truthful disclosure of our own beliefs might destroy the happiness of others, or subvert beliefs which are plainly necessary for their moral well-being. Cases of this kind will continually occur in life, and a good man who deals with each case as it arises will probably find no great difficulty in steering his course. But the vague and fluctuating lines of moral compromise cannot without grave moral danger be reduced to fixed rules to be carried out to their full logical consequences. The immortal pages of Pascal are sufficient to show to what extremes of immorality the doctrine that the end justifies the means has been pushed by the casuists of the Church of which Cardinal Newman was so great an ornament.

A large and difficult field of moral compromise is opened out in the case of war, which necessarily involves a complete suspension of great portions of the moral law. This is not merely the case in unjust wars; it applies also, though in a less degree, to those which are most necessary and most righteous. War is not, and never can be, a mere passionless discharge of a painful duty. It is in its essence, and it is a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise among great masses of men the destructive and combative passions—passions as fierce and as malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to its death or the tiger springs upon its prey. Destruction is one of its chief ends. Deception is one of its chief means, and one of the great arts of skilful generalship is to deceive in order to destroy. Whatever other elements may mingle with and dignify war, this at least is never absent; and however reluctantly men may enter into war, however conscientiously they may endeavour to avoid it, they must know that when the scene of carnage has once opened these things must be not only accepted and condoned, but stimulated, encouraged and applauded. It would be difficult to conceive a disposition more remote from the morals of ordinary life, not to speak of Christian ideals, than that with which the soldiers most animated with the fire and passion that lead to victory rush forward to bayonet the foe.

War indeed, which is absolutely indispensable in our present stage of civilisation, has its own morals which are very different from those of peaceful life. Yet there are few fields in which, through the stress of moral motives, greater changes have been effected. In the early stages of human history it was simply a question of power. There was no distinction between piracy and regular war, and incursions into a neighbouring State without provocation and with the sole purpose of plunder brought with them no moral blame. To carry the inhabitants of a conquered country into slavery; to slaughter the whole population of a besieged town; to destroy over vast tracts every town, village and house, and to put to death every prisoner, were among the ordinary incidents of war. These things were done without reproach in the best periods of Greek and Roman civilisation. In many cases neither age nor sex was spared![25] In Rome the conquered general was strangled or starved to death in the Mamertine prison. Tens of thousands of captives were condemned to perish in gladiatorial shows. Julius Caesar, whose clemency has been so greatly extolled, 'executed the whole senate of the Veneti; permitted a massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri; sold as slaves 40,000 natives of Genabum; and cut off the right hands of all the brave men whose only crime was that they held to the last against him their town of Uxellodunum.'[26] No slaughter in history is more terrible than that which took place at Jerusalem under the general who was called 'the delight of the human race,' and when the last spasm of resistance had ceased, Titus sent Jewish captives, both male and female, by thousands to the provincial amphitheatres to be devoured by wild beasts or slaughtered as gladiators.

Yet from a very early period lines were drawn forming a clear though somewhat arbitrary code of military morals. In Greece a broad distinction was made between wars with Greek States and with Barbarians, the latter being regarded as almost outside the pale of moral consideration. It is a distinction which in reality was not very widely different from that which Christian nations have in practice continually made between wars within the borders of Christendom, and wars with savage or pagan nations. Greek, and perhaps still more Roman, moralists have written much on the just causes of war. Many of them condemn all unjust, aggressive, or even unnecessary wars. Some of them insist on the duty of States always endeavouring by conferences, or even by arbitration, to avert war, and although these precepts, like the corresponding precepts of Christian divines, were often violated, they were certainly not without some influence on affairs. It is probably not too much to say that in this respect Roman wars do not compare unfavourably with those of Christian periods. It is remarkable how large a part of the best Christian works on the ethics of war is based on the precepts of pagan moralists, and although in antiquity as in modern times the real cause of war was often very different from the pretexts, the sense of justice in war was as clearly marked in Roman as in most Christian periods.[27]

Great stress was laid upon the duty of a formal declaration of war preceding hostilities. Polybius mentions the reprobation that was attached in Greece to the AEtolians for having neglected this custom. It was universal in Roman times, and during the mediaeval period the custom of sending a challenge to the hostile power was carefully observed. In modern times formal declaration of war has fallen greatly into desuetude. The hostilities between England and Spain under Elizabeth, and the invasion of Germany by Gustavus Adolphus, were begun without any such declaration, and there have been numerous instances in later times.[28]

The treatment of prisoners has been profoundly modified. Quarter, it is true, has been very often refused in modern wars to rebels, to soldiers in mutiny, to revolted slaves, to savages who themselves give no quarter. It has been often—perhaps generally—refused to irregular soldiers like the French Francs-tireurs in the War of 1870, who without uniforms endeavoured to defend their homes against invasion. It was long refused to soldiers who, having rejected terms of surrender, continued to defend an indefensible place, but this severity during the last three centuries has been generally condemned. But, on the whole, the treatment of the conquered soldier has steadily improved. At one time he was killed. At another he was preserved as a slave. Then he was permitted to free himself by payment of a ransom; now he is simply kept in custody till he is exchanged or released on parole, or till the termination of the war. In the latter half of the present century many elaborate and beneficent regulations for the preservation of hospitals and the good treatment of the wounded have been sanctioned by international agreement. The distinction between the civil population and combatants has been increasingly observed. As a general rule non-combatants, if they do not obstruct the enemy, are subjected to no further injury than that of paying war contributions and in other ways providing for the subsistence of the invaders. The wanton destruction of private property has been more and more avoided. Such an act as the devastation of the Palatinate under Louis XIV. would now in a European war be universally condemned, though the wholesale destruction of villages in our own Indian frontier wars and the methods employed on both sides in the civil war in Cuba appear to have borne much resemblance to it. In the treatment of merchants the rule of reciprocity which was laid down in Magna Charta is largely observed, and the Conference of Brussels in 1874 pronounced it to be contrary to the laws of war to bombard an unfortified town. The great Civil War in America probably contributed not a little to raise the standard of humanity in war; for while few long wars have been fought with such determination or at the cost of so many lives, very few have been conducted with such a scrupulous abstinence from acts of wanton barbarity.

Many restrictive rules also have been accepted tending in a small degree to mitigate the actual operations of war, and they have had some real influence in this direction, though it is not possible to justify the military code on any clear principle either of ethics or logic. Assassination and the encouragement of assassination; the use of poison or poisoned weapons; the violation of parole; the deceptive use of a flag of truce or of the red cross; the slaughter of the wounded; the infringement of terms of surrender or of other distinct agreements, are absolutely forbidden, and in 1868 the Representatives of the European Powers assembled at St. Petersburg agreed to abolish the use in war of explosive bullets below the weight of 14 ounces, and to forbid the propagation in an enemy's country of contagious disease as an instrument of war. It laid down the general principle that the object of war is confined to disabling the enemy, and that weapons calculated to inflict unnecessary suffering, beyond what is required for attaining that object, should be prohibited. At the same time explosive shells, concealed mines, torpedoes and ambuscades lie fully within the permitted agencies of war. Starvation may be employed, and the cutting off of the supply of water, or the destruction of that supply by mixing with it something not absolutely poisonous which renders it undrinkable. It is allowable to deceive an enemy by fabricated despatches purporting to come from his own side; by tampering with telegraph messages; by spreading false intelligence in newspapers; by sending pretended spies and deserters to give him untrue reports of the numbers or movements of the troops; by employing false signals to lure him into an ambuscade. On the use of the flag and uniform of an enemy for purposes of deception there has been some controversy, but it is supported by high military authority.[29] The use of spies is fully authorised, but the spy, if discovered, is excluded from the rights of war and liable to an ignominious death.

Apart from the questions I have discussed there is another class of questions connected with war which present great difficulty. It is the right of men to abdicate their private judgment by entering into the military profession. In small nations this question is not of much importance, for in them wars are of very rare occurrence and are usually for self-defence. In a great empire it is wholly different. Hardly any one will be so confident of the virtue of his rulers as to believe that every war which his country wages in every part of its dominions, with uncivilised as well as civilised populations, is just and necessary, and it is certainly prima facie not in accordance with an ideal morality that men should bind themselves absolutely for life or for a term of years to kill without question, at the command of their superiors, those who have personally done them no wrong. Yet this unquestioning obedience is the very essence of military discipline, and without it the efficiency of armies and the safety of nations would be hopelessly destroyed. It is necessary to the great interests of society, and therefore it is maintained, strengthened by the obligation of an oath and still more efficaciously by a code of honour which is one of the strongest binding influences by which men can be governed.

It is not, however, altogether absolute, and a variety of distinctions and compromises have been made. There is a difference between the man who enlists in the army of his own country and a man who enlists in foreign service either permanently or for the duration of a single war. If a man unnecessarily takes an active part in a struggle between two countries other than his own, it may at least be demanded that he should be actuated, not by a mere spirit of adventure or personal ambition, but by a strong and reasoned conviction that the cause which he is supporting is a righteous one. The conduct of a man who enlists in a foreign army which may possibly be used against his own country, and who at least binds himself to obey absolutely chiefs who have no natural authority over him, has been much condemned, but even here special circumstances must be taken into account. Few persons I suppose would seriously blame the Irish Catholics of the eighteenth century who filled the armies of France, Austria, Spain and Naples at a time when disqualifying laws excluded them, on account of their religion, from the British army and from almost every path of ambition at home. There is also perhaps some distinction between the position of a soldier who is obliged to serve, and a soldier in a country where enlisting is voluntary, and also between the position of an officer who can throw up his commission without infringing the law, and a private who cannot abandon his flag without committing a grave legal offence. At the beginning of the war of the American Revolution some English officers left the army rather than serve in a cause which they believed to be unrighteous. It was in their full power to do so, but probably none of them would have desired that private soldiers who had no legal choice in the matter should have followed their example and become deserters from the ranks.

There are, however, extreme cases in which the violation of the military oath and disobedience to military discipline are justified. More than once in French history an usurper or his agent has ordered soldiers to coerce or fire upon the representatives of the nation. In such cases it has been said 'the conscience of the soldier is the liberty of the people,' and the refusal of private soldiers to obey a plainly illegal order will be generally though not universally applauded. In all such cases, however, there is much obscurity and inconsistency of judgment. The rule that the moral responsibility falls exclusively on the person who gives the order, and that the private has no voice or responsibility, will even here be maintained by some. Ought a private soldier to have refused to take part in such an execution as that of the Duc d'Enghien, or in the Coup d'Etat of Napoleon III.? Ought he to refuse to fire on a mob if he doubts the legality of the order of his superior officer? In such cases there is sometimes a direct conflict between the civil and the military law, and there have been instances in which a soldier might be punishable before the first for acts which were absolutely enforced by the second.[30]

Perhaps the strongest case of justifiable disobedience that can be alleged is when a soldier is ordered to do something which involves apostasy from his faith, though even here it would be difficult to show, in the light of pure reason, that this is a graver thing than to kill innocent men in an unrighteous cause. In the Early Church there were some soldier martyrs who suffered death because they believed it inconsistent with their faith to bear arms, or because they were asked to do some acts which savoured of idolatry. The story of the Thebaean legion which was said to have been martyred under Diocletian rests on no trustworthy authority, but it illustrates the feeling of the Church on the subject. Josephus tells how Jewish soldiers refused in spite of all punishments to bring earth with the other soldiers for the reparation of the Temple of Belus at Babylon. Conflicts between military duty and religious duty must have not unfrequently arisen during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and in our own century and in our own army there have been instances of soldiers refusing through religious motives to escort or protect idolatrous processions in India, or to present arms in Catholic countries when the Host was passing. Quaker opinions about war are absolutely inconsistent with the compulsory service which prevails in nearly all European countries, and religious scruples about conscription have been among the motives that have brought the Russian Raskolniks into collision with the civil power.

One of the most serious instances of the collision of duties in our time is furnished by the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. From the days of Clive, Sepoy soldiers have served under the British flag with an admirable fidelity, and the Mutiny of Vellore in 1806, which was the one exception, was due, like that of 1857, to a belief that the British Government were interfering with their faith. Few things in the history of the great Mutiny are so touching as the profound belief of the English commanders of the Sepoy regiments in the unalterable loyalty of their soldiers. Many of them lost their lives through this belief, refusing even to the last moment and in spite of all evidence to abandon it. They were deceived, and, in the fierce outburst of indignation that followed, the conduct of the Sepoy soldiers was branded as the blackest and the most unprovoked treachery.

Yet assuredly no charge was less true. Agitators for their own selfish purposes had indeed acted upon the troops, but recent researches have fully proved that the real as well as the ostensible cause of the Mutiny was the greased cartridges. It was believed that the cartridges which had been recently issued for the Sepoy regiments were smeared with a mixture of cow's fat and pig's fat, one of these ingredients being utterly impure in the eyes of the Hindoo, and the other in the eyes of the Mussulman. To bite these cartridges would destroy the caste of the Hindoo and carry with it the loss of everything that was most dear and most sacred to him both in this world and in the next. In the eyes both of the Moslem and the Hindoo it was the gravest and the most irreparable of crimes, destroying all hopes in a future world, and yet this crime, in their belief, was imposed upon them as a matter of military duty by their officers. It was as if the Puritan soldiers of the seventeenth century had been ordered by their commanders to abjure their hopes of salvation and to repudiate and insult the Christian faith.

It is true that the existence of these obnoxious ingredients in the new cartridges was solemnly denied, but the sincerity of the Sepoy belief is incontestable, and General Anson, the commander-in-chief, having examined the cartridges, was compelled to admit that it was very plausible.[31] 'I am not so much surprised,' he wrote to Lord Canning, 'at their objections to the cartridges, having seen them. I had no idea they contained, or rather are smeared with such a quantity of grease, which looks exactly like fat. After ramming down the ball, the muzzle of the musket is covered with it.'

Unfortunately this is not a complete statement of the case. It is a shameful and terrible truth that, as far as the fact was concerned, the Sepoys were perfectly right in their belief. In the words of Lord Roberts, 'The recent researches of Mr. Forrest in the records of the Government of India prove that the lubricating mixture used in preparing the cartridges was actually composed of the objectionable ingredients, cow's fat and lard, and that incredible disregard of the soldiers' religious prejudices was displayed in the manufacture of these cartridges.'[32] This was certainly not due, as the Sepoys imagined, to any desire on the part of the British authorities to destroy caste or to prepare the way for the conversion of the Sepoys to Christianity. It was simply a glaring instance of the indifference, ignorance and incapacity too often shown by British administrators in dealing with beliefs and types of character wholly unlike their own. They were unable to realise that a belief which seemed to them so childish could have any depth, and they accordingly produced a Mutiny that for a time shook the English power in India to its very foundation.

The horrors of Cawnpore—which were due to a single man—soon took away from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than that of the Sepoy troops.

Many of my readers will remember an exquisite little poem called 'The Forced Recruit,' in which Mrs. Browning has described a young Venetian soldier who was forced by the conscription to serve against his fellow-countrymen in the Austrian army at Solferino, and who advanced cheerfully to die by the Italian guns, holding a musket that had never been loaded in his hand. Such a figure, such a violation of military law, will claim the sympathy of all, but a very different judgment should be passed upon those who, having voluntarily entered an army, betray their trust and their oath in the name of patriotism. In the Fenian movement in Ireland, one of the chief objects of the conspirators was to corrupt the Irish soldiers and break down that high sense of military honour for which in all times and in many armies the Irish people have been conspicuous. 'The epidemic' [of disaffection], boasts a writer who was much mixed in the conspiracies of those times, 'was not an affair of individuals, but of companies and of whole regiments. To attempt to impeach all the military Fenians before courts martial would have been to throw England into a panic, if not to precipitate an appalling mutiny and invite foreign invasion.'[33]

I do not quote these words as a true statement. They are, I believe, a gross exaggeration and a gross calumny on the Irish soldiers, nor do I doubt that most, if not all, the soldiers who may have been induced over a glass of whiskey, or through the persuasions of some cunning agitator, to take the Fenian oath would, if an actual conflict had arisen, have proved perfectly faithful soldiers of the Queen. The perversion of morals, however, which looks on such violations of military duty as praiseworthy, has not been confined to writers of the stamp of Mr. O'Brien. A striking instance of it is furnished by a recent American biography. Among the early Fenian conspirators was a young man named John Boyle O'Reilly. He was a genuine enthusiast, with a real vein of literary talent; in the closing years of his life he won the affection and admiration of very honourable men, and I should certainly have no wish to look too harshly on youthful errors which were the result of a misguided enthusiasm if they had been acknowledged as such. As a matter of fact, however, he began his career by an act which, according to every sound principle of morality, religion, and secular honour, was in the highest degree culpable. Being a sworn Fenian, he entered a regiment of hussars, assumed the uniform of the Queen, and took the oath of allegiance for the express purpose of betraying his trust and seducing the soldiers of his regiment. He was detected and condemned to penal servitude, and he at last escaped to America, where he took an active part in the Fenian movement. After his death his biography was written in a strain of unqualified eulogy, but the biographer has honestly and fully disclosed the facts which I have related. This book has an introduction written by Cardinal Gibbons, one of the most prominent Catholic divines in the United States. The reader may be curious to see how the act of aggravated treachery and perjury which it revealed was judged by a personage who occupies all but the highest position in a Church which professes to be the supreme and inspired teacher of morals. Not a word in this Introduction implies that O'Reilly had done any act for which he should be ashamed. He is described as 'a great and good man,' and the only allusion to his crime is in the following terms: 'In youth his heart agonises over that saddest and strangest romance in all history—the wrongs and woes of his motherland—that Niobe of the Nations. In manhood, because he dared to wish her free, he finds himself a doomed felon, an exiled convict, in what he calls himself the Nether World.... The Divine faith implanted in his soul in childhood flourished there undyingly, pervaded his whole being with its blessed influences, furnished his noblest ideals of thought and conduct.... The country of his adoption vies with the land of his birth in testifying to the uprightness of his life.... With all these voices I blend my own, and in their name I say that the world is brighter for having possessed him.'[34]

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Newman's Anglican Difficulties, p. 190.

[25] See Grotius, de Jure, book iii. ch. iv. On the Jewish notions on this subject, see Deut. ii. 34; vii. 2, 16; xx. 10-16; Psalm cxxxvii. 9; 1 Sam. xv. 3. I have collected some additional facts on this subject in my History of European Morals.

[26] Tyrrell and Purser's Correspondence of Cicero, vol. v. p. xlvii.

[27] See Grotius, de Jure Belli et Pacis.

[28] Much information on this subject will be found in a remarkable pamphlet (said to have been corrected by Pitt) called 'An Enquiry into the Manner in which the different wars in Europe have commenced during the last two centuries, by the Author of the History and Foundation of the Law of Nations in Europe' (1805).

[29] See Tovey's Martial Law and the Custom of War, part 2, pp. 13, 29. A striking instance of the deceptive use of a flag occurred in 1781, when the English, having captured St. Eustatius from the Dutch, allowed the Dutch flag still to float over its harbour in order that Dutch, French, Spanish and American ships which were ignorant of the capture might be decoyed into the harbour and seized as prizes. Some writers on military law maintain that this was within the rights of war.

[30] See Fitzjames Stephen's History of the Criminal Law, i. 205.

[31] Lord Roberts' Forty-one Years in India, i. 94.

[32] Ibid. p. 431.

[33] Contemporary Review, May 1897. Article by William O'Brien, 'Was Fenianism ever Formidable?'