Some ten or twelve years ago a certain young woman, then fresh from
the hands of an esteemed but erratic professor of English literature,
wrote a novel the plot of which was roughly as follows. A college
graduate suddenly finds himself the inheritor of a shoe factory in a
New England town. Filled with the benevolent ideas absorbed in the
academic contemplation of economics, he undertakes to introduce
profit-sharing with his employees and otherwise to conduct his
business for the benefit of the community. So far, good. But hard
times follow, and his competitors by lowering wages and reducing labor
are able to undersell him. Now there is in his control a considerable
sum of money which a widow had entrusted to his father to invest for
her, and the question arises whether he shall shut down his mills and
inflict suffering upon his men, or shall divert this trust fund to his
business and so try to tide over the period of stress. He yields to
his sympathies and virtually embezzles the trust fund; but fails
nevertheless, and with his own loss brings ruin upon the widow. The
story was called "The Burden of Christopher," with the implication
that the hero was a bearer of Christ in his misfortune, and the author
indicates pretty clearly her sentiment that in surrendering his
personal integrity for the expected good of his working people he was
following the higher of two conflicting codes of ethics.
The book no doubt has gone its own way to the "limbo large and broad,"
where the heroes of ancient fiction wander with
Embryoes and idiots, eremits and friars;
but it made a lasting impression on one reader at least, as the first
popular presentation to come under his notice of a theory which now
confronts him wherever he turns his eyes. There has, in fact, been an
astonishing divulgation in the past decade of what is called, with
magnificent audacity, the New Morality.
Perhaps the most honored teacher of this code is the mistress of Hull
House, who by her devoted life and her services to the people of
Chicago in various times of need has won the right to speak with a
certain authority for the striving generation of the day. And in one
of her books, the "Newer Ideals of Peace," Miss Addams tells of an
actual occurrence and infers a moral which points in the same
direction as the novel of "Christopher." A family of five children is
left motherless. The father, a drunkard, disappears, and the household
is left to the care of a feeble old grandmother. Thereupon work is
found for the oldest boy, "a fine, manly little fellow" of twelve, who
feels keenly "his obligation to care for the family"; but after a time
he becomes "listless and indifferent," and at sixteen turns to
professional tramping. "It was through such bitter lessons as these,"
observes Miss Addams, "we learned that good intentions and the
charitable impulse do not always work for righteousness." As the story
is told there is a plain implication that to find work for a boy under
such circumstances is "cruel and disastrous" (her own comment), and
that society, and not his own nature, was responsible for his relapse.
One would suppose that scarcely an honest workman, or prosperous
merchant, or successful professional man had ever taken up the burden
of life in youth or childhood. Certainly, hardship and physical waste
often result from the demands of life, but there is not a single word
in Miss Addams's account to indicate that she has felt the higher need
for the future citizen of developing in him a sensitiveness to the
peculiar duties that confront him, or has reflected on the moral evil
that might have been done the boy if he had been relieved of his
natural obligations and his family had been supported by society. "Our
democracy," as she says with approval, "is making inroads upon the
family, the oldest of human institutions."
This is not an isolated case in Miss Addams's works, nor does it in
any wise misrepresent her. In another book, "The Spirit of Youth and
the City Streets," the thesis is maintained and reiterated, that
crime is for the most part merely the result of repressing a wholesome
"love for excitement" and "desire for adventure." In the year 1909
"there were arrested and brought into court [in Chicago] fifteen
thousand young people under the age of twenty, who had failed to keep
even the common law of the land. Most of these young people had broken
the law in their blundering efforts to find adventure." The inference
to be drawn here and throughout the book is that one need only relieve
the youth of the land from the necessity of "assuming responsibility
prematurely," affording them meanwhile abundant amusement, and the
instincts of lawlessness and the pursuit of criminal pleasure will
vanish, or almost vanish, of themselves--as if there were no Harry
Thaws, and the sons of the rich were all virtuous.
But it must not be supposed that Hull House occupies a place of lonely
isolation as the fountain of these ideas. From every self-authorized
centre of civic virtue in which a type-writer is at work, the stream
proceeds. The very presses groan, as we used to say when those
machines were still in the mythological stage, at their labor of
supplying the world with the new intellectual pabulum. At this moment
there lies before the writer of this article a pile of books, all
recently published, which are devoted more or less specifically to the
subject, and from all of which, if he had courage to go through them,
he might cull abundant examples and quotations. He was, indeed, about
to enter this "hollow cave, amid the thickest woods," when, an
unvaliant knight, he heard the warning of the lady Una:
Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place
I better wot then you, though now too late
To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,
Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,
To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
We have in fact to deal with the consummation of a long and
deep-seated revolution, and there is no better way to understand the
true character of the movement than by turning aside a moment to
glance at its historical sources. The attempt to find a new basis of
conduct, as we see it exemplified in the works of Miss Jane Addams
and a host of other modern writers, is in fact only one aspect of the
slow drift from mediæval religion to humanitarianism. For a thousand
years, and well into the second thousand, the ethical feeling of
Christian Europe may be said to have taken its color from the saying,
"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul?"--which in extreme cases was interpreted as if it
read, If he _reform_ the whole world; and on the other, kindred
saying, "Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and
thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me"--in which the
command of charity was held to be not so much for the benefit of the
poor as for the liberation of the giver's own soul from the powers of
this world. Such was the law, and its binding force was confirmed by
the conception of a final day of wrath when the souls of men should
stand before a merciless tribunal and be judged to everlasting joy or
everlasting torment. The vivid reality of the fear that haunted men,
at least in their moments of reflection, may be understood from the
vivid horrors of such a picture as Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment,"
or from the meditations of one of the most genial of English
cavaliers. In his little treatise on "Man in Darkness"--appropriate
title--Henry Vaughan puts the frank question to himself:
And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's
pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to
lie forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and
unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius],
"that this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass
or mountain of sand, and that a little wren came but once in
every thousand years to fetch away but one grain of that huge
heap; what an innumerable number of years would be spent before
that world of sand could be so fetched away! And yet, alas! when
the damned have lain in that fiery lake so many years as all
those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out than the
first hour they entered in."
No doubt practice and precept were at variance then, as to a certain
extent they are at all times, and there were many texts in the Bible
which might be taken to mitigate the harsher commands; but such in
its purest, highest form was the law, and in the more sensitive minds
this conception of the soul naked before a judging God must have
created a tremendous anxiety in practice. Morality was obedience and
integrity and scorn of the world for an ideal of inner righteousness;
it created a sense of individual responsibility for every word and
deed; and, say what we will, there was something magnificent in this
contempt of the reckoning of other men for that eternal fame which
... lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
But there was also in this law something repellent and even monstrous.
Who has not shuddered with amazement at the inscription which Dante
set over the portal of Hell: E 'L PRIMO AMORE? Was it Love that
prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time
the vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the
everlasting doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few
years spent in a world of shadows and illusions? There is something
repulsively irrational in the notion of an unchanging eternity
suspended on the action of a moment of time--_ex hoc momento pendet
æternitas_. It should seem to be unthinkable, if it had not actually
been thought. As a matter of fact the rigor and crudity of this
doctrine had been mitigated in the Middle Ages by the interposition
between man and God of the very human institution of the Church with
its substitution of temporal penances and pardons, and an interposed
Purgatory in place of the terrible paradox of irrevocable judgment. It
remained for the Reformation and particularly for the Calvinistic
Puritans to tear away those veils of compromise and bring man face to
face with the awful abstraction he had created. The result was for a
while a great hardening and strengthening of character, salutary
indeed after what may be called the almost hypocritical compromise of
Catholicism; but in the end human nature could not endure the rigidity
of its own logic, and in revolting turned, not to another compromise,
but to questioning of the very hypothesis of its faith.
The inevitable reaction from the intolerable logic of the Protestants
was Deism, in which God was stript altogether of his judicial and
moral attributes and reduced to a kind of immanent, all-benevolent
force in nature. "But now comes a modern Sage," says Warburton of
Bolingbroke, "... who tells us 'that they made the Basis of Religion
far too wide; that men have no further concern with GOD than TO
BELIEVE THAT HE IS, which his _physical Attributes_ make fully
manifest; but, that he is _a rewarder of them who diligently seek
him_, Religion doth not require us to believe, since this depends on
God's MORAL ATTRIBUTES, of which we have no conception.'" But such a
position was manifestly untenable, for it left no place for the
undeniable existence of evil in this world and life. From the
unaccountable distribution of wrong and suffering the divine had
argued the certainty of adjustment in a future state; the deist had
flown in the face of facts by retaining the belief in a benevolent
Providence while taking from it the power of supernatural retribution;
the atheist was more logical, he denied the existence of Providence
altogether and turned the universe over to chance or blind law. Such
was the progress of thought from Baxter to Bolingbroke and from
Bolingbroke to Hume.
The positive consequences of this evolution are written large in the
literature of the eighteenth century. With the idea of an avenging
deity and a supernatural test there disappeared also the sense of deep
personal responsibility; the very notion of a radical and fundamental
difference between good and evil was lost. The evil that is apparent
in character comes to be regarded merely as the result of the
restraining and thwarting institutions of society as these exist--why,
no one could explain. Envy and jealousy and greed and the sheer
ambition of power, all those traits, which were summed up in the
single Greek word _pleonexia_, _the desire to have more_, are not
inherent in the human heart, but are artificially introduced by the
possession of property and a false civilization. Change these
institutions or release the individual entirely from restrictions, and
his nature will recoil spontaneously to its natural state of virtue.
He needs only follow the impulse of his instinctive emotions to be
sound and good. And as a man feels of himself, so he feels of others.
There is no real distinction between the good and the evil, but all
are naturally good, and the superficial variations we see are caused
by the greater or less freedom of development. Hence we should condemn
no man, even as we do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for
sharp judgment, and the laws which impose penalties and restrictions,
and set up false discriminations between the innocent and the
criminal, are subject to suspicion, and should be made as flexible as
possible. In place of judgment we are to regard all mankind with
sympathy, feeling with them a sort of emotional solidarity, the one
great virtue, in which are included, or rather sunk, all the law and
the prophets. In fine, we have arrived at humanitarianism; humanity
has become God.
It was the great work of the eighteenth century, beginning in England
and developing in France, to formulate this change, and indoctrinate
with it the mind of the unthinking masses. Here is not the place to
follow the development in detail, and those who care to see its
outcome may be referred to the keen and unjustly neglected chapters in
La Harpe's "Lycée" on the _philosophes_. To those, indeed, who are
acquainted with the philosophical writings that preceded and
introduced the French Revolution, the epithet "new" as it is attached
to our present-day morality may seem a bit presumptuous, for it would
be difficult to find a single fundamental idea in current literature
on this subject which could not be closely paralleled by a quotation
from Rousseau, or Diderot, or Helvétius, or one of their compeers.
Thus, in our exaltation of sympathy above judgment, and of the
unrestrained emotions generally as the final rule of character, we are
but following Diderot's philosophy of the heart: "Les passions
amorties dégradent les hommes extraordinaires"; and when we read in
Ellen Key, and a host of other feminist liberators, the apotheosis of
love as higher than any divine or human obligations, we are but
meeting again with Toussaint's religion a little disguised: "On aime
de même Dieu et sa maîtresse." Our revolt from constitutional law as
a power imposed by the slower reflection of men upon their own
immediate desires and opinions, is essentially the same as the
restlessness consecrated by the French _économistes_ in the phrase,
"le despotisme légal." And, to return whence we began, the economics
of Hull House flow only too easily from Helvétius' definition of
virtue as "le désir du bien public," and from his more specific
statement: "The integrity which is related to an individual or to a
small society is not the true integrity; integrity considered in
relation to the public is the only kind that really deserves and
generally obtains the name."
Miss Addams herself has been disturbed by these reminiscences. Thus
she quotes from one of the older humanitarians a characteristic
saying: "The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as
elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," and
repudiates it as vague and impractical beside the New Morality. She
ought to know, and may be right; yet it is not easy to see wherein her
own ethics are any less vague, when she deplores the act of a boy who
goes to work for his starving grandmother because in doing so he is
unfitting himself for future service to society. And as for
effectiveness, it might seem that the French Revolution was a
practical result fairly equivalent in magnitude to what has been
achieved by our college settlements. But Miss Addams is by no means
peculiar in this assumption of originality. Nothing is more notable in
the Humanitarian literature of the day than the feeling that our own
age is severed from the past, and opens an entirely new epoch in
history. "_The race has now crossed the great divide of human
history!_" exclaims an hysterical doctor of divinity in a book just
published. "The tendency of the long past has been toward _diversity_,
that of the longer future will be toward _oneness_. The change in this
stream of tendency is not a temporary deviation from its age-long
course--a new bend in the river. It is an actual reversal of the
current, which beyond a peradventure will prove permanent." To this
ecstatic watcher, the sudden reversal took place at no remote date,
but yesterday; and by a thousand other watchers the same miracle is
vociferously heralded. Beyond a peradventure! Not a little of this
flattering assumption is due to the blind and passionate hope of the
human heart clamoring against the voice of experience from similar and
different movements in the past, which have somehow failed to renovate
the world. So many prophets before now have cried out, looking at the
ever-flowing current of time, and having faith in some Thessalian
magic:
Cessavere vices rerum.
... Amnisque cucurrit
Non qua pronus erat.
So often they have been disappointed; but at last we have seen--beyond
a peradventure. If the vicissitudes of fate have not ceased, yet at
least we have learned to look with complacency on the very law of
mutation, from which the eyes of men had hitherto turned away in
bewildered horror, at last the stream has turned back upon its
sources, and change itself is carrying us no longer towards diversity,
but towards the consummation of a divine oneness.
But it would equally be an error to insist too dogmatically on the
continuity of the present-day movement with that of the eighteenth
century, for, after all, "the world do move." It is true for one thing
that for a hundred years or thereabout there was a partial reaction
against the doctrines of the _philosophes_, during which time the
terrors of the Revolution lay like a warning nightmare in the
imagination of the more thoughtful men. A hundred years is a long
period for the memory to bridge, particularly in a time when the
historical sense has been weakened. Superficially, too, the
application of the theory is in some respects different from what it
was; the law of social sympathy has been developed into different
conceptions of Socialism, and we have devised fresh schemes for giving
efficacy to the immediate will of the people. Even deeper is the
change that has come over the attitude of religious organizations
towards the movement. In the age of the Revolution the Church, both
Catholic and Protestant, was still strongly entrenched in the old
beliefs, and offered a violent resistance to the substitutions of
humanitarianism for responsibility to itself and to a God. Now this
last barrier has been almost swept away. Indeed, not the least
remarkable feature of this literature is the number of clergymen who
are contributing to it, with their constant appeal to the New Morality
as the test of faith. Open one of these books before us--let us take
"The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life," for the promise of its
title--and you will be pretty likely to come upon such a passage as
this: "Faith's fellowship with Jesus is one with the realization of
our fellowship in humanity"; or, on another page: "If the fundamental
of the true philosophy cannot be found by common men, what advantage
in any man's finding it? If life's secret, direction, and power ... is
not attainable by the lowliest, then a man of this age, living in the
social passion of our time, is forced to be indifferent to that which
would be the monopoly of a few gifted souls." If such a social passion
means anything, it means the reconstruction of life to the level of
the gutter. It is the modern sham righteousness which would have
called from Jesus the same utter scorn as that which he poured upon
the Pharisaical cant of his own day. Yet it is not in religious books
alone that you will meet with this sort of irreligion. For one sermon
you will hear on the obligation of the individual soul to its maker
and judge, and on the need of regeneration and the beauty of holiness,
you will hear a score on the relation of a man to his fellows and on
the virtue of social sympathy. In effect, the first and great
commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and
with all thy soul and with all thy mind," has been almost forgotten
for the second, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Worship in
the temple is no longer a call to contrition and repentance, but an
organized flattery of our human nature, and the theological seminary
is fast becoming a special school for investigating poverty and
spreading agnosticism. In this sense, or degree, that humanitarianism
is no longer opposed by organized religion, but has itself usurped the
place of religion, the New Morality may really justify its name.
What are the results of this glorification of humanity? What does the
New Morality mean in life and conduct? Well, of such matters it is
wise to speak cautiously. The actual morals of an age are an extremely
complicated and elusive network of facts, and it is only too easy to
generalize from incomplete observation. On the other hand we must
guard against allowing ourselves to be deceived by the fallacy
everywhere heard, that, because the preacher has always, even from the
remotest record of Egypt, bewailed his own times as degenerate,
therefore no age has fallen off in morality from its predecessor. Such
an argument is a complete _non-sequitur_; there have been periods of
degeneration, and there may yet be. As for our own age, only a fool
would dogmatize; we can only balance and surmise. And in the first
place a certain good must almost certainly be placed to the credit of
humanitarianism. It has softened us and made us quicker to respond to
the sufferings of others; the direct and frightful cruelty that runs
through the annals of history like a crimson line has been largely
eliminated from civilization, and with it a good deal of the brutality
of human nature. We sometimes hear the present age compared with the
later Roman Republic and the Empire, and in some respects speciously,
but the callousness of the great Romans to human misery and their
hardness are almost unthinkable to-day. Consider a sentence or two
from Appian: "The head and hand of Cicero were suspended for a long
time from the rostra in the forum where formerly he had been
accustomed to make public speeches, and more people came together to
behold this spectacle than had previously come to listen to him. It is
said that even at his meals Antony placed the head of Cicero before
his table, until he became satiated with the horrid sight." Such an
episode scarcely stands out from the hideous story of the Civil Wars;
to the modern reader it brings a feeling almost of physical sickness.
So much we seem to have gained, and the change in this respect even
from our own seventeenth century shows that the credit is due in no
small part to the general trend of humanitarianism.
But in other directions the progress is not so clear. Statistics are
always treacherous witnesses, but so far as we can believe them and
interpret them we can at best draw no comfort from the prevalence of
crime and prostitution and divorce and insanity and suicide. At least,
whatever may be the cause of this inner canker of society, our social
passion seems to be powerless to cure it. Some might even argue that
the preaching of any doctrine which minimizes personal responsibility
is likely to increase the evil. Certainly a teacher who, like Miss
Jane Addams, virtually attributes the lawless and criminal acts of our
city hoodlums to the wholesome desire of adventure which the laws
unrighteously repress, would appear to be encouraging the destructive
and sensual proclivities which are too common in human nature, young
and old. Nor are the ways of honesty made clear by a well-known
humanitarian judge of Denver, who refused to punish a boy for stealing
a Sunday-School teacher's pocketbook, for the two good reasons, as his
honor explained in a public address, "that the boy was not
responsible, and, secondly, that there were bigger thieves in the pews
upstairs." So, too, a respectable woman of New York who asks whether
it may not be a greater wrong for a girl to submit to the slavery of
low wages than to sell herself on the street, is manifestly not
helping the tempted to resist. She is even doing what she can with her
words to confuse the very bounds of moral and physical evil.
There is, in fact, a terrible confusion hidden in the New Morality, an
ulcerous evil that is ever working inward. Sympathy, creating the
desire for even-handed justice, is in itself an excellent motive of
conduct, and the stronger it grows, the better the world shall be. But
sympathy, spoken with the word "social" prefixed, as it commonly is on
the platforms of the day, begins to take on a dangerous connotation.
And "social sympathy" erected into a theory which leaves out of
account the responsibility of the individual, and seeks to throw the
blame of evil on the laws and on society, though it may effect
desirable reforms here and there in institutions, is bound to leave
the individual weakened in his powers of resistance against the
temptations which can never be eliminated from human life. The whole
effect of calling sympathy justice, and putting it in the place of
judgment, is to relax the fibre of character, and nourish the passions
at the expense of reason and the will. And undoubtedly the conviction
is every day gaining ground among cool observers of our life that the
manners and morals of the people are beginning to suffer from this
relaxation in many insidious ways apart from acts which come into the
cognizance of the courts. The sensuality of the prevailing music and
dancing, the plays that stir the country as organs of moral
regeneration, the exaggeration of sex in the clothing seen on the
street, are but symptoms more or less ominous to our mind as we do or
do not connect them with the regnant theory of ethics. And in the end
this form of social sympathy may itself quite conceivably bring back
the brutality and cruelty from which it seems to have delivered us.
The Roman who gloated over the head of his and the people's enemy
lived two thousand years ago, and we think such bloodthirstiness is no
longer possible in public life. Yet not much more than a century ago
the preaching of social sympathy could send a Lebon and his kind over
France with an insatiable lust for killing, complicated with Sadism,
while at home the leader of the Government of the most civilized
country of Europe was justifying such a régime on the pious principle
that, "when the sovereign people exercises its power, we can only bow
before it; in all it does all is virtue and truth, and no excess,
error, or crime is possible." The animal is not dead within us, but
only asleep. If you think he has been really conquered, read what he
has been doing in Congo and the Putomayo Indians, or among the
redeemers of the Balkan states. Or if you wish to get a glimpse of
what he may yet do under the spur of social sympathy, consider the
callous indifference shown by the labor unions to the revelation, if
it deserves the name, of the system of dynamiting and murder employed
in the service of "class-consciousness." These things are to be taken
into account, not as bugbears, for society at large is no doubt sound
at heart and will arouse itself at last against its false teachers,
but as symptoms to warn and prepare.
To some few the only way out of what seems a state of moral blindness
is through a return to an acknowledgment of the responsibility of the
individual soul to its maker and inflexible judge. They may be right.
Who can tell what reversal of belief may lie before us or what
religious revolution may be preparing in the heart of infidelity? But
for the present, at least, that supernatural control has lost its
general efficacy, and even from the pulpit has only a slight and
intermittent appeal. Nor does such a loss appear without its
compensations, when we consider the harshness of mediæval theology or
the obliquities of superstition that seem to be inherent in the purest
of religions. Meanwhile, the troubled individual, whatever his
scepticism may be, need not be withheld from confirming his moral
faith by turning from the perverted doctrine of the "Enlightenment"
and its recrudescence in modern humanitarianism, to the larger and
higher philosophy which existed long before the materialism of the
eighteenth century, and before the earlier anthropomorphism, and which
persisted unchanged, though often half-concealed, through those ages,
and still persists as a kind of shamefast inheritance of truth. It is
not necessary to go to ancient books to recover that faith. Let a man
cease for a moment to look so strenuously upon what is right for his
neighbors. Let him shut out the voices of the world, and disregard the
stream of informing books which pour upon him from the modern press,
as the "floud of poyson" was spewed upon Spenser's Knight from
"_Errours den_":
Her fruitful cursed spawne of serpents small.
Let him retire into himself, and in the silence of such recollection
examine his own motives and the sources of his self-approval and
discontent. He will discover there in that dialogue with himself, if
his abstraction is complete and sincere, that his nature is not simple
and single, but dual, and the consequences to him in his judgment of
life and in his conduct will be of incalculable importance. He will
learn, with a conviction which no science or philosophy falsely
so-called can shake, that beside the passions and wandering desires
and blind impulses and the cravings for pleasure and the prod of
sensations, there is something within him and a part of him, rather in
some way his truer self, which controls and checks and knows and
pronounces judgment, unmoved amid all motion, unchanged amid continual
change, of everlasting validity above the shifting valuations of the
moment. He may not be able to express this insight in terms that will
satisfy his own reason or will convince others, but if his insight is
true, he will not waver in loyalty to it, though he may sin against it
times without number in spoken word and impulsive deed. Rather his
loyalty will be confirmed by experience. For he will discover that
there is a happiness of the soul which is not the same as the pleasure
of fulfilled desires, whether these be for good or for ill, a
happiness which is not dependent upon the results of this or that
choice among our desires, but upon the very act itself of choice and
self-control, and which grows with the habit of staying the throng of
besetting and inflicting impulses always until the judicial _fiat_ has
been pronounced. It is thus that happiness is the final test of
morality, bringing with it a sense of responsibility to the
supernatural command within the soul of the man himself, as binding as
the laws of religion, and based on no disputable revelation or outer
authority. Such a morality is neither old nor new, and stands above
the varying customs of society. It is not determined essentially by
the relation of a man to his fellows or by their approval, but by the
consciousness of rightness in the man's own breast,--in a word, by
character. Its works are temperance, truth, honesty, trustworthiness,
fortitude, magnanimity, elevation; and its crown is joy.
Then, under the guidance of this intuition, a man may turn his eyes
upon the world with no fear of being swayed by the ephemeral winds of
doctrine. Despite the clamor of the hour he will know that the
obligation to society is not the primal law, and is not the source of
personal integrity, but is secondary to personal integrity. He will
believe that social justice is in itself desirable, but he will hold
that it is far more important to preach first the responsibility of
each man to himself for his own character. He will admit that equality
of opportunity is an ideal to be aimed at, but he will think this a
small thing in comparison with the universality of duty. In his
attitude towards mankind he will not deny the claims of sympathy, but
he will listen first to the voice of judgment:
Away with charity that soothes a lie,
And thrusts the truth with scorn and anger by.
He will be sensitive to the vast injustices of life, and its
widespread sorrows, but he will not be seduced by that compassion into
the hypocrisy of saying that "the love of those whom a man does not
know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man
does know."