The Turkish conscience allows many wives; the Redskin conscience allows the scalping of enemies; the Afghan conscience applauds the dutiful son who murders the nephew of his father's enemy; the cannibal conscience is silent at a feast of cold missionary; the Chinese conscience goes blandly to the killing of girl babies; the Rand conscience sees no evil in the flogging of Kaffirs and Chinese; the aristocratic conscience is not ashamed of taking the bread from starving peasants and their children; the capitalist conscience permits the making of fortunes out of sweated labour.
Now, cannibalism, murder, cheating, tyranny, the flogging of slaves, and the torture of enemies are all immoral and evil things. They cannot be good things in the East and bad things in the West. But conscience—the mysterious and wonderful "still small voice"—blames man in one part of the world and praises him in another for committing those acts.
Conscience is local: it tells one tale in Johannesburg or Pekin, and quite a different tale in Amsterdam or Paris.
And to find out which tale is the true one we have to use our reason.
As to historical conscience. What men thought good a few centuries ago they now think bad.
Take only a few examples. Men once saw no wrong in slavery, in trial by wager of battle, in witch-burning, in the torture of prisoners to extract evidence, in the whipping of lunatics, in the use of child-labour in mines and factories, in duelling, bear-baiting, prize-fighting, and heavy drinking.
Not very long ago men would tear out a man's tongue for "blasphemy," would hang a woman for stealing a turnip, would burn a bishop alive for heresy, would nail an author to the pillory by his ear for criticising a duke, would sell women and children felons into slavery; and conscience would never whisper a protest.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE
Now, it was wrong to burn heretics, and pillory reformers, and work babies to death in the mill and the mine in those days, or it is right to do the same things now.
But conscience now condemns as wrong the same acts which it once approved as right; it now approves as right what it once condemned as wrong.