CHAPTER IV.
Sources of Benevolence.
There is a common phrase which is likely to become a most powerful antagonist to any arguments that have been put forward in the foregoing pages: and I think it would be good policy for me to commence the attack, and endeavour to expose its weakness in the first instance. If you propose any experiment for remedying an evil, it is nearly sure to be observed that your plan is well enough in theory, but that it is not practical. Under that insidious word “practical” lurk many meanings. People are apt to think that a thing is not practical, unless it has been tried, is immediate in its operation, or has some selfish end in view. Many who do not include, either avowedly, or really, the two latter meanings, incline, almost unconsciously
perhaps, to adopt the former, and think that a plan, of which the effects are not foreknown, cannot be practical. Every new thing, from Christianity downwards, has been suspected, and slighted, by such minds. All that is greatest in science, art, or song, has met with a chilling reception from them. When this apprehensive timidity of theirs is joined to a cold or selfish spirit, you can at best expect an Epicurean deportment from them. Warming themselves in the sun of their own prosperity, they soothe their consciences by saying how little can be done for the unfed, shivering, multitude around them. Such men may think that it is practical wisdom to make life as palatable as it can be, taking no responsibility that can be avoided, and shutting out assiduously the consideration of other men’s troubles from their minds. Such, however, is not the wisdom inculcated in that religion which, as Goethe well says, is grounded on “Reverence for what is under us,” and which teaches us “to recognize humility and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace and wretchedness, suffering and death, as things divine.”
There is a class of men utterly different from those above alluded to, who, far from entertaining any Epicurean sentiments, are prone to view with fear the good things of this world. And, indeed, seeing the multiform suffering which is intertwined with every variety of human life, a man in present ease and well-being may naturally feel as if he had not his share of what is hard to be endured. The fanatic may seek a refuge from prosperity, or strive to elevate his own nature, by self-inflicted tortures; but one, who adds wisdom to sensibility, finds in his own well-being an additional motive for benevolent exertions. It is surely bad management when a man does not make a large part of his self-sacrifices subservient to the welfare of his fellow-men. In active life nothing avails more than self-denial; and there its trials are varying and multifarious: but ascetics, by placing their favourite virtue in retirement, made it dwindle down into one form only of self-restraint.
I suppose there are few readers of history who have not occasionally turned from its
pages with disgust, confusion, a craving for any grounds of disbelief, and a melancholy darkness of soul. It can hardly be otherwise, when you read, for instance, of the colossal brutalities of the Roman Emperors, many of whom indulged in a sportive cruelty to their fellow men, which reminds one of children with insects. When you find, again, some mighty Master of the World, renowned for valour, and for prudence, one of those emphatically called the “Good” Emperors, kindly presenting hundreds of men to kill each other for the amusement of the Roman multitude—when you are told that that multitude contained, what may have been for that age, good men, and gentle women—when, passing lower down the turbid stream of the recorded past, you read of Popes and Cardinals, Inquisitors and Bishops, men who must have heard from time to time some portions of the holy words of mercy and of love, when you find them, I say, counselling and plotting and executing, the foulest deeds of blood—when, descending lower still, you approach those days when law became the tyrant’s favourite scourge, and you find the
legal slave telling his master how he has interrogated some poor wretch “in torture, before torture, after torture, and between torture”—when you have some insight into what that thing torture was, by contrasting the hand-writing of the distracted sufferer before and after his examination—when, to your surprise, you read that these very victims of persecution, were themselves restless and dissatisfied, unless they could direct the arm of power against another persecuted race—and when, coming to your own day, you find that men, separated from you by distance, though not by time, can show the utmost recklessness of human life, if differently coloured from their own. Pondering over these things, your heart may well seek comfort in the thought that these tyrants were, or are, rude men, of iron frame, ready to inflict, ready themselves to suffer. It is not so. A Nero clings to his own life with abject solicitude. A Louis the Eleventh, who could keep other men in cages, wearies Heaven with prayers, and Earth with strange devices, to preserve his own grotesque existence. A James the First, who can sanction at the least, if not
direct, the torture to be applied to a poor, old, clergyman, was yet in the main a soft-hearted man, can feel most tenderly for a broken limb of any favourite, have an anxious affection for “Steenie and Baby Charles,” and an undoubted, and provident, regard for his own “sacred” person. What shall we say, too, of that Chancellor of his, a man, like his master, of a soft heart, full of the widest humanity, and yet, as far as we know, unconscious of the horror of those ill doings transacted in his own great presence? Why is it that I recall these things? Why do I bring forward what many of us, forgetting the iron weight with which the sentiments of his age press down even upon the mightiest genius, might look upon as a humiliating circumstance far greater than it is, in the life of a man we ought all to love so much? Is history a thing done away with, or is not the past for ever in the present? And is it not but too probable that we ourselves are occasionally guilty of things which, for our lights, are as sad aberrations as those which, in reading of the past, we have dwelt upon with the profoundest pity, and turned away from in
overwhelming amazement? Are we quite sure that none of the vices of tyranny rest with us; and that we individually, or nationally, have not to answer for any carelessness of human life or for any indifference to human suffering?
What is it that has put a stop to many of the obvious atrocities I allude to as disgracing the page of history? The introduction of some great idea, the recognition, probably, in some distinct form of the command “to do unto others as you would they should do unto you.” And this is what is wanted with regard to the relation of the employer and employed. Once let the minds even of a few men be imbued with an ampler view of this relation, and it is scarcely possible to estimate the good that may follow. Around that just idea what civilization may not grow up! You gaze at the lofty cathedral in the midst of narrow streets and squalid buildings, but all welcome to your sight as the places where miserable men first found sanctuary; you pass on and look with pleasure at the rich shops and comfortable dwellings;