of all our judgments. A new principle of classification is introduced,
by which we differentiate the goats from the sheep. It is hard after
that to revive the old admirations. The temperance agitation of the
last century has not abolished drunkenness, but it has made the
conception of a pious, respectable drunkard seem grotesque. It has also
reduced the business of liquor-selling to a decidedly lower place in
the esteem of the community. When we read to-day of the horrors of the
slave trade, we reconstruct in our imagination the character of the
slave trader,--and a brutal wretch he is. But in his day the Guinea
captain held his own with the best. He was a good husband and father,
a kind neighbor, a generous benefactor. President Ezra Stiles of Yale
College, in his “Literary Diary,” describes such a beautiful character.
It was when Dr. Stiles was yet a parish minister in Newport that one of
his parishioners died, of whom he wrote: “God had blessed him with a
good Estate and he and his Family have been eminent for Hospitality to
all and Charity to the poor and afflicted. At his death he recommended
Religion to his Children and told them that the world was nothing.
The only external blemish on his Character was that he was a little
addicted to the marvelous in stories of what he had seen in his Voyages
and Travels. But in his Dealings he was punctual, upright, and honest,
and (except as to the Flie in the Oynment, the disposition to tell
marvelous Stories of Dangers, Travels, &c.), in all other Things he
was of a sober and good moral character, respected and beloved of all,
so as to be almost without enemies. He was forward in all the concerns
of the Church and Congregation, consulting its Benefit and peaceably
falling in with the general sense without exciting quarrels, parties,
&c., and even when he differed from his Brethren he so differed from
them that they loved him amidst the differences. He was a peaceable man
and promoted Peace.”
It was in 1773 that this good man died in the odor of sanctity. It is
quite incidentally that we learn that “he was for many years a Guinea
captain, and had no doubt of the slave trade.” His pastor suggests that
he might have chosen another business than that of “buying and selling
the human species.” Still, in 1773, this did not constitute an offense
serious enough to be termed a fly in the ointment. In 1785, Dr. Stiles
speaks of the slave trade as “a most iniquitous trade in the souls
of men.” Much may happen in a dozen years in changing one’s ideas of
moral values. In another generation the civilized world was agreed that
the slave trade was piracy. After that there were no fine Christian
characters among the slave traders.
There is evidence that at the present time there is an awakening of
the social conscience that threatens as great a revolution as that
which came with the abolition of the slave trade. Business methods
which have been looked upon as consistent with high moral character are
being condemned as “the sum of all villainies.” The condemnation is
not yet universal, and there are still those who are not conscious that
anything has happened. The Christian monopolist, ruthlessly crushing
out his competitors and using every trick known to the trade, has no
more doubts as to the rightfulness of his proceedings than had the good
Newport captain in regard to the slave trade.
It is a good time to have his obituary written. His contemporaries
appreciate his excellent private virtues, and have been long accustomed
to look leniently on his public wrong-doing. The new generation, having
agreed to call his methods robbery, may find the obituary eulogies
amusing.
AN HOUR WITH OUR PREJUDICES
We may compare the human mind to a city. It has its streets, its places
of business and amusement, its citizens of every degree. When one
person is introduced to another it is as if the warder drew back the
bolts, and the gates were thrown open. If he comes well recommended
he is given the freedom of the city. In the exercise of this freedom,
however, the stranger should show due caution.
There is usually a new quarter. Here the streets are well lighted and
policed, the crowds are cosmopolitan, and the tourist who wanders about
looking at the shop windows is sure of a civil reply to his questions.
There is no danger of highway robbers, though of course one may be
taken in by confidence men. But if he be of an inquiring mind and a
lover of the picturesque, he is not satisfied with this. After all, the
new quarters are very much alike, and one tires after a while of shop
windows. The visitor longs to explore the old town, with its winding
ways, with its overhanging houses, and its mild suggestions of decay.
But in the mental city the lover of the picturesque must remember that
he carries his life in his hands. It is not safe to say to a casual
acquaintance, “Now I have a fair idea of that part of your mind which
is like that of any other decently educated person. I have seen all the
spick and span show places, and admired all the modern improvements.
Where are your ruins? I should like to poke around a while in the more
dilapidated section of your intellect.”
Ah, but that is the Forbidden City. It is inhabited, not by orderly
citizens, under the rule of Right Reason, but by a lawless crowd known
as the Prejudices. They are of all sorts and conditions. Some are of
aristocratic lineage. They come from a long line of hereditary chiefs,
who, as their henchmen have deserted them, have recreated into their
crumbling strongholds. Some are bold, roistering blades who will not
stand a question; dangerous fellows, these, to meet in the dark! The
majority, perhaps, are harmless folk, against whom the worst that can
be said is that they have a knack of living without visible means of
support.
A knowledge of human nature, as distinguished from a knowledge of moral
philosophy, is a perception of the important part played by instinctive
likes and dislikes, by perverse antipathies, by odd ends of thought, by
conclusions which have got hopelessly detached from their premises--if
they ever had any. The formal philosopher, judging others by himself,
works on the assumption that man is naturally a reasoning animal,
whereas experience teaches that the craving for the reasonable is an
acquired taste.
Of course we all have reasons for our opinions,--plenty of them!
But in the majority of cases they stand not as antecedents, but as
consequents. There is a reversal of the rational order like that
involved in Dr. Hale’s pleasant conceit of the young people who adopted
a grandmother. In spite of what intellectual persons say, I do not see
how we can get along without prejudices. A prejudice is defined as “an
opinion or decision formed without due examination of the facts or
arguments which are necessary to a just and impartial determination.”
Now, it takes a good deal of time to make a due examination of facts
and arguments, even in regard to a small matter. In the meantime our
minds would be sadly unfurnished. If we are to make a fair show in the
world, we must get our mental furniture when we set up housekeeping,
and pay for it on the installment plan.
Instead of taking a pharisaic attitude toward our neighbor’s
prejudices, it is better to cultivate a wise tolerance, knowing that
human intercourse is dependent on the art of making allowances. This is
consistent with perfect honesty. There is always something to admire if
the critic is sufficiently discriminating. When you are shown a bit of
picturesque dilapidation, it is quite possible to enjoy it. Said the
Hebrew sage, “I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard
of the man void of understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with
thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall
thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked
upon it, and received instruction.”
His point of view was that of a moralist. Had he also been a bit of an
artist, the sight of the old wall with its tangle of flowering briers
would have had still further interest.
When one’s intellectually slothful neighbor points with pride to
portions of his untilled fields, we must not be too hard upon him. We
also have patches of our own that are more picturesque than useful.
Even if we ourselves are diligent husbandmen, making ceaseless war on
weeds and vermin, there are times of relenting. Have you never felt a
tenderness when the ploughshare of criticism turned up a prejudice of
your own? You had no heart to harm the
Wee sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie.
It could not give a good account of itself. It had been so long snugly
ensconced that it blinked helplessly in the garish light. Its
wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin’!
And naething now to big a new ane.
You would have been very angry if any one had trampled upon it.
This is the peculiarity about a prejudice. It is very appealing to
the person who holds it. A man is seldom offended by an attack on his
reasoned judgments. They are supported by evidence and can shift for
themselves. Not so with a prejudice. It belongs not to the universal
order; it is his very own. All the chivalry of his nature is enlisted
in its behalf. He is, perhaps, its only defense against the facts of an
unfriendly world.
We cannot get along without making allowances for these idiosyncrasies
of judgment. Conversation is impossible where each person insists on
going back, all the time, to first principles, and testing everything
by an absolute standard. With a person who is incapable of changing his
point of view we cannot converse; we can only listen and protest. We
are in the position of one who, conscious of the justice of his cause,
attempts to carry on a discussion over the telephone with “Central.” He
only hears an inhuman buzzing sound indicating that the line is busy.
There is nothing to do but to “hang up the ’phone.”
When a disputed question is introduced, one may determine the true
conversationalist by applying the method of Solomon. Let it be
proposed to divide the subject so that each may have his own. Your
eager disputant will be satisfied, your genial talker is aghast at the
proposition, for he realizes that it would kill the conversation.
Instead of holding his own, he awaits developments. He is in a mood
which can be satisfied with something less than a final judgment. It
is not necessary that his friend’s opinions should be just; it is
sufficient that they are characteristic. Whatever turn the talk may
take, he preserves an easy temper. He is a heresy-hunter,--not of the
grim kind that goes hunting with a gun; he carries only a camera. If
he stirs up a strange doctrine he does not care to destroy it. When he
gets a snap-shot at human nature he says,--
Those things do best please me
That befall preposterously.
An English gentleman relates a conversation he had with Prince
Bismarck. The prince was inclined to take a pessimistic view of the
English people. He thought that there was a degeneration in the race,
which he attributed to the growing habit of drinking water. “Not that
he believed that there was any particular virtue _per se_ inherent in
alcoholic drink; but he was sorry to hear that the old ‘three bottle
men’ were dying out and leaving no successors. He had a suspicion that
it meant shrinkage in those qualities of the English which had made
them what they were in the past, and for which he had always felt a
sincere admiration.”
It would have been very easy to drift into debate over this
proposition. The English gentleman, however, defended his countrymen
more diplomatically. “I replied that with regard to the water-drinking
proclivities of my countrymen there was a good deal of calumny
connected with the story. It is true that a certain section of English
society has indeed taken to water as a beverage. But to argue therefrom
that the English people have become addicted to water would be to draw
premature conclusions from insufficient data. In this way I was able to
calm Prince Bismarck’s fears in regard to what the future might bring
forth, and our conversation reverted to Royalty.”
Each nation has its own set of preconceptions. We must take them
altogether, or not at all. They are as compact and as natural a growth
as the concentric layers of an onion. Here is a sentence from Max
Müller’s “Autobiography,” thrown out quite incidentally. He has been
telling how strange it seemed, when first coming to Oxford, to find
that the students got along without dueling. Fighting with swords
seemed to him the normal method of developing manliness, though he adds
that in the German universities “pistol duels are generally preferred
by theological students, because they cannot easily get a living if the
face is scarred all over.”
This remark must be taken as one would take a slice of the
national onion. One assumption fits into another. To an Englishman
or an American there is an incongruity that approaches the
grotesque,--because our prejudices are different. It all becomes a
matter-of-fact statement when we make the proper assumptions in regard
to dueling in general and theological duels in particular. Assuming
that it is necessary for theological students to fight duels, and
that the congregations are prejudiced against ministers whose faces
have been slashed by swords, what is left for the poor theologues
but pistols? Their method may seem more dangerous than that adopted
by laymen, but Max Müller explains that the danger is chiefly to the
seconds.
Individual peculiarities must be taken into account in the same way.
Prince Bismarck, in dining with the Emperor, inquired the name of the
brand of champagne, which proved to be a cheap German article. “The
Emperor explained, ‘I drink it from motives of economy, as I have a
large family; then again I drink it from patriotic motives.’ Thereupon
I said to the Emperor, ‘With me, your Majesty, patriotism stops short
in the region of my stomach.’”
It is evident that here was a difference not to be arbitrated by
reason. If the Emperor could not understand the gastronomic limitations
to the Chancellor’s patriotism, neither could the Chancellor enter into
the Emperor’s anxieties, as he economized for the sake of his large
family.
One cannot but wonder at the temerity of a person who plunges into
conversation with a stranger without any preliminary scouting or making
sure of a line of retreat. Ordinary prudence would suggest that the
first advances should be only in the nature of a reconnoissance in
force. You may have very decided prejudices of your own, but it is not
certain that they will fraternize with those of your new acquaintance.
There is danger of falling into an ambush. There are painful occasions
when we remember the wisdom of the Son of Sirach: “Many have fallen by
the edge of the sword, but not so many as have fallen by the tongue.”
The mischief of it is that the most kindly intent will not save us. The
path of the lover of mankind is beset by difficulties for which he is
not prepared. There are so many antagonisms that are unpredictable.
When Nehemiah came to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem he remarked
grimly, “When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the
Ammonite, heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly that there was come
a man to seek the welfare of the children of Israel;” and the trouble
was that a large number of the children of Israel themselves seem to
have resented the interference with their habitual misfortunes. The
experience of Nehemiah is that of most reformers. One would suppose
that the person who aims at the greatest good for the greatest number
would be greeted with instant applause. The difficulty is that the
greatest good is just what the greatest number will not tolerate. One
does not need to believe in human depravity to recognize the prejudice
which most persons have against anything which is proposed as good
for them. The most successful philanthropists are those who most
skillfully conceal their benevolent intent.
In Coleman’s “Life of Charles Reade” there is a paragraph which gives
us a glimpse of a prejudice that has resisted the efforts of the most
learned men to eradicate it. An incident is there recorded that took
place when Reade was a fellow in Magdalen College. “Just as I was
about to terminate my term of office (I hope with credit to myself
and the ’Varsity), an untoward incident occurred which embittered my
relations for life with two very distinguished men. Professor Goldwin
Smith and his friend John Conington, who belonged to us, had attempted
to inaugurate a debating society. A handful of unmannerly young cubs,
resenting the attempt to teach them political economy, ducked poor
Conington under the college pump.”
“Resenting the attempt to teach them political economy!”--What is the
source of that resentment? What psychologist has fathomed the abyss of
the dark prejudice which the natural man has against those who would
improve his mind? It is a feud which reaches back into hoar antiquity.
Doubtless the accumulated grievances of generations of schoolboys
have intensified the feud, but no amelioration of educational methods
has put an end to it. In the most successful teacher you may detect a
nervous strain like that which the trainer of wild beasts in the arena
undergoes. His is a perilous position, and every faculty must be on the
alert to hold the momentary ascendency. A single false motion, and the
unmannerly young cubs would be upon their victim.
Must we not confess that this irrational resentment against our
intellectual benefactors survives, in spite of all discipline, into
mature life? We may enlarge the area of our teachableness, but there
are certain subjects in regard to which we do not care to be set right.
The polite conventionality according to which a person is supposed to
know his own business is an evidence of this sensitiveness. Of course
the assumption is not justified by facts. A man’s own business is just
the thing he is conscious of not knowing, and he would give anything in
a quiet way to find out. Yet when a candid friend ventures to instruct
him, the old irrational resentment flashes out. What we call tact is
the ability to find before it is too late what it is that our friends
do not desire to learn from us. It is the art of withholding, on
proper occasions, information which we are quite sure would be good for
them.
The prejudice against our intellectual superiors, which leads us to
take their well-meant endeavors in our behalf as of the nature of
personal insults, is matched by the equally irrational repulsion which
many superior people have for their inferiors. Nothing can be more
illogical than the attitude of these gifted ones who use their gifts
as bludgeons with which to belabor the rest of us. When we read the
writings of men who have a stimulating sense of their own genius,
we are struck by their nervous irritability whenever they mention
“mediocrity.” The greater number of the quarrels of the authors, which
the elder Disraeli chronicled, arose from the fact that the authors
had the habit of accusing one another of this vice. One would suppose
mediocrity to be the sum of all villainies, and that the mediocre man
was continually plotting in the night watches against the innocent
man of genius; and yet what has the mediocre man done to deserve this
detestation? Poor fellow, he has no malice in him! His mediocrity is
only an afterthought. He has done his level best; his misfortune is
that several million of his fellowmen have done as well.
The superior man, especially if his eminence be accidental, is likely
to get a false notion of those who stand on the level below him. The
biographer of an English dignitary says that the subject of his memoir
was not really haughty, but “he was apt to be prejudiced against any
one who seemed to be afraid of him.” This is a not uncommon kind of
prejudice; and in nine cases out of ten it is unfounded. The great man
should remember that most of those whose manners seem unduly respectful
mean nothing personal.
As great Pompey passes through the streets of Rome, he may be pardoned
for thinking meanly of the people. They appear to be a subservient lot,
with no proper interests of their own, their happiness dependent on his
passing smile,--and he knows how little that is worth. He sees them at
a disadvantage. Let him leave his triumphal chariot, and, in the guise
of Third Citizen, fall into friendly chat with First Citizen and Second
Citizen, and his prejudices will be corrected. He will find that these
worthy men have a much more independent and self-respecting point of
view than he had thought possible. They are out for a holiday; they
are critics of a spectacle, easily pleased, they will admit; but if no
one except Pompey is to be seen to-day, why not make the most of him?
Pompey or Cæsar, it matters not; “the play’s the thing.”
* * * * *
The origin of some of our prejudices must be sought in the childhood
of the race. There are certain opinions which have come down from the
cave-dwellers without revision. They probably at one time had reasons
to justify them, though we have no idea what they were. There are
others, which seem equally ancient, which originated in the forgotten
experiences of our own childhood. The prehistoric age of myth and fable
does not lie far behind any one of us. It is as if Gulliver had been
educated in Lilliput, and, while he had grown in stature, had never
quite emancipated himself from the Lilliputian point of view. The great
hulking fellow is always awkwardly trying to look up at things which he
has actually outgrown. He tries to make himself believe that his early
world was as big as it seemed. Sometimes he succeeds in his endeavors,
and the result is a curious inversion of values.
Mr. Morley, in speaking of Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy, says: “The
Sultan’s ability to speak French was one of the odd reasons why Lord
Palmerston was sanguine of Turkish civilization.” This association of
ideas in the mind of the Prime Minister does seem odd till we remember
that before Lord Palmerston was in the cabinet he was in the nursery.
The fugitive impressions of early childhood reappear in many curious
shapes. Who would be so hard-hearted as to exorcise these guiltless
ghosts?
Sometimes, in reopening an old book over which long ago we had dreamed,
we come upon the innocent source of some of our long-cherished
opinions. Such discovery I made in the old Family Bible when opening at
the pages inserted by the publisher between the Old Testament and the
Apocrypha. On many a Sunday afternoon my stated hour of Bible reading
was diversified by excursions into these uncanonical pages. There was
a sense of stolen pleasure in the heap of miscellaneous secularities.
It was like finding under the church roof a garret in which one might
rummage at will. Here were tables of weights and measures, explanations
about shekels, suggestions in regard to the probable length of a
cubit, curious calculations as to the number of times the word “and”
occurred in the Bible. Here, also, was a mysterious “Table of Offices
and Conditions of Men.”
I am sure that my scheme of admirations, my conception of the
different varieties of human grandeur, has been colored by that “Table
of Offices and Conditions of Men.” It was my “Social Register” and
Burke’s “Peerage” and “Who’s Who?” all in one. It was a formidable
list, beginning with the patriarchs, and ending with the deacons. The
dignity of the deacon I already knew, for my uncle was one, but his
function was vastly exalted when I thought of him in connection with
the mysterious personages who went before. There was the “Tirshatha, a
governor appointed by the kings of Assyria,”--evidently a very great
man. Then there were the “Nethinims, whose duty it was to draw water
and to cleave wood.” When I was called upon to perform similar services
I ventured to think that I myself, had I lived in better days, might
have been recognized as a sort of Nethinim.