Listen to the talk in a drawing-room when some question involving the fate of thousands is introduced. There is a strike or lock-out. It means that the hostile parties are struggling on a narrow ledge between two precipices. The workmen are trying to push the employers into the abyss of bankruptcy; the employers are exerting every means in their power to hurl their antagonists into the abyss of starvation. It is a battle to the death, and in many a home pale-faced women are watching it with despairing eyes. But what says my lady who likes to talk about current events? It is evident when she begins to speak that she is not touched by the tragedy of it all. Nero watching the burning of Rome could not assume an air of more complete detachment. She talks as if it were nothing to her. Or the talk turns to the affairs of state. Issues that involve the fate of nations awake in her only a languid curiosity. The diplomacy of prudent statesmen who are endeavoring to keep the peace strikes her as mere dilly-dallying. She wants to see something doing. She enjoys a romantic sensation, and urges on those who would give her this pleasure. Was there ever a useless war without fair faces looking down upon it approvingly—at least at the beginning?
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried, “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall.”
Yet she who in regard to the great affairs which involve millions may appear as “La Belle Dame sans Merci” may be to all those whom she knows a minister of purest kindness. It is only towards those whom she does not know that she is pitiless.
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Philosophers are usually cruel in their judgments of the persons and events of the passing day, and that is perhaps the reason why no nation has been willing to take the hint from Plato and allow the philosophers to rule. It would be too harsh a despotism. Flesh and blood could not endure it. For the philosopher is concerned with general laws and is intolerant of exceptions, while it is the quality of mercy to treat each person as in some degree an exception. Fancy the misery that would be involved in the attempt to level us all up to the cold heights of abstract virtue on which Spinoza dwelt. One shudders to think of the calamity that would ensue were all our lawmakers to be suddenly Hegelianized. All the attempts to alleviate the hard conditions under which people are living would cease. The energy that is now spent in trying to abolish abuses would then be directed toward explaining them. What wailings would go up from earth’s millions on the proclamation of the rule of unlimited Spencerianism! We should look back with envy to the good old times of Nero and Tamerlane.
As the Inquisition handed its victims over to the secular arm and disclaimed all further responsibility, so this new tyrant would hand over all the unfit to the unobstructed working of natural law. No attention would be paid to our sentimental preferences for particular persons. Those merciful interferences which have been the contrivance of mankind for the protection of weakness must be swept aside. The unfit must take the full penalty justly visited on their unfitness. The moment we begin to particularize we rebel. Pity revolts against a too cold philosophy.
It is needless to say that the theologians have often attained refinements of cruelty unknown even to the most severely logical of the secular philosophers. They have been able to distill out of the purest religious affections a poison capable of producing in the sensitive soul unutterable agony. Then they have watched the writhing of the victim with a cold benevolence. The worst of it was that the benevolence was real in spite of the fact that it froze all the fountains of natural pity.