lity, originality; and when men act, they will act, from the
consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a hedge,
leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be brave, and swaying
about in mobs and masses. These were the intellectual weaknesses which,
as I read history, followed on physical degradation in Imperial Rome, in
Alexandria, in Byzantium. Have we not seen them reappear, under fearful
forms, in Paris but the other day?

I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and shall hold,
to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me to blame and to
judge: because it tells me that these defects are mainly physical; that
those who exhibit them are mainly to be pitied, as victims of the sins or
ignorance of their forefathers. But it tells me too, that those who,
professing to be educated men, and therefore bound to know better, treat
these physical phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy; who
even exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the weaknesses of
fallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most dangerous of
public enemies, let them cloak their quackery under whatsoever patriotic,
or scientific, or even sacred words.

There are those again honest, kindly, sensible, practical men, many of
them; men whom I have no wish to offend; whom I had rather ask to teach
me some of their own experience and common sense, which has learned to
discern, like good statesmen, not only what ought to be done, but what
can be done--there are those, I say, who would sooner see this whole
question let alone. Their feeling, as far as I can analyse it, seems to
be, that the evils of which I have been complaining, are on the whole
inevitable: or, if not, that we can mend so very little of them, that it
is wisest to leave them alone altogether, lest, like certain sewers, "the
more you stir them, the more they smell." They fear lest we should
unsettle the minds of the many for whom these evils will never be mended;
lest we make them discontented; discontented with their houses, their
occupations, their food, their whole social arrangements; and all in
vain.

I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise deeply
with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--But are not
people discontented already, from the lowest to the highest? And ought a
man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy, sinful world as this is, and
always has been, to be any