The shuffling plea, 'Behold we knew it not,' is a cowardly lie. It
admits the responsibility to knowledge and pretends an ignorance which
it knows to be partly a false excuse, and in so far as it is true, to
be our own fault. We are bound to know, and the most ignorant of us
does know, and cannot help knowing, enough to condemn our negligence.
How many of us have ever tried to find out how the pariahs of
civilisation live who live beside us? Our ignorance so far as it is
real is the result of a sinful indolence. And there is a sadder form
of it in an ignorance which is the result of familiarity. We all know
how custom dulls our impressions. It is well that it should be so, for
a surgeon would be fit for little if he trembled and was shaken at the
sight of the tumour he had to work to remove, as we should be; but his
familiarity with misery does not harden him, because he seeks to
remove the suffering with which he has become familiar. But that same
familiarity does harden and injure the whole nature of the onlooker
who does nothing to alleviate it. Then there is an ignorance of other
suffering which is the result of selfish absorption in one's own
concerns. The man who is caring for himself only, and whose thoughts
and feelings all flow in the direction of his own success, may see
spread before him the most poignant sorrows without feeling one throb
of brotherly compassion and without even being aware of what his eyes
see. So, in so far as the excuse 'we knew it not' is true, it is no
excuse, but an indictment. It lays bare the true reason of the
criminal negligence as being a yet more criminal callousness as to the
woe and loss in which such crowds of men whom we ought to recognise as
brethren are sunken.