The genius is proverbially known by his quick pulse, though the same symptom may be observed in many defective people. Waste and repair alike go on quickly. He is eminently adaptable; he takes any shape. But the great test of the genuineness of the article is his sincerity. Above all things must his higher moral sense remain intact.
History has given us one splendid example of the highest type of genius in the great Dutch hero, William the Silent; the man who, to use the words of his biographer, bore the burden of a nation’s sorrows on his shoulders with a smiling face. A homeless wanderer with a price set upon his head, poor, friendless and unsupported, this man opposed himself to the trained legions of Spain, the wealth of Brazil, and the tremendous machinery of the Inquisition.
The result was the independence of the United Provinces!
And the cause of it?
Here let us quote Father William’s own words.
“Before seeking to conclude a treaty with any earthly potentate,” he writes to his brother Louis, “I had entered into an alliance with the King of Kings.”
We are not surprised to learn that this man fell by the hand of an assassin, with a prayer for others on his lips.
CHAPTER VIII.
IMPERFECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL SYSTEM.
TO treat such a subject adequately in so small a space is obviously an impossibility. It must suffice to point out some of the chief causes of nerve-deterioration in present conditions, and the directions in which some improvement may gradually be wrought. The notion that evils can be remedied merely by passing laws is happily exploded. The law is now seen to be evidence and ratification of public opinion, and also a means of putting public opinion into action. Without this agreement on the part of the majority, the law becomes a dead letter, or is enforced only at the expense of dire catastrophe.
There is, however, one justification of the efforts of those who wish to pass laws condemning certain abuses: they actually influence the public mind by means of the agitation raised for the purpose of attaining their ends; and so they create the opinion they would ratify. It also frequently happens that the agitators arouse disgust at their bigotry and fixity of idea, and so produce an opposite effect to that which they intended. Indeed, though devotion to a Cause is generally supposed to be an ennobling thing, it sometimes happens that it is a debasing and demoralising thing. For, instead of Self being sunk in the Cause, the Cause becomes with many a very excuse for selfishness. Persons considered high-principled, who would on no account misrepresent or defraud for their own confessed advantage, will nevertheless think almost any expedient justifiable in what they are pleased to term the public good.