gthened and passive impressions weakened by repetition, and a
life spent in active charitable work is quite compatible with much
sobriety and even coldness of judgment in estimating each case as it
arises. It is not the surgeon who is continually employed in operations
for the cure of his patients who is most moved at the sight of
suffering.

This is, I believe, on the whole true, but it is also true that there
are grave diseases which attach themselves peculiarly to the unselfish
side of our nature, and they are peculiarly dangerous because men,
feeling that the unselfish is the virtuous and nobler side of their
being, are apt to suffer these tendencies to operate without supervision
or control. Yet it is hardly possible to exaggerate the calamities that
have sprung from misjudged unselfish actions. The whole history of
religious persecution abundantly illustrates it, for there can be
little question that a large proportion of the persecutors were
sincerely seeking what they believed to be the highest good of mankind.
And if this dark page of human history is now almost closed, there are
still many other ways in which a similar evil is displayed. Crotchets,
sentimentalities and fanaticisms cluster especially around the unselfish
side of our nature, and they work evil in many curious and subtle ways.
Few things have done more harm in the world than disproportioned
compassion. It is a law of our being that we are only deeply moved by
sufferings we distinctly realise, and the degrees in which different
kinds of suffering appeal to the imagination bear no proportion to their
real magnitude. The most benevolent man will read of an earthquake in
Japan or a plague in South America with a callousness he would never
display towards some untimely death or some painful accident in his
immediate neighbourhood, and in general the suffering of a prominent and
isolated individual strikes us much more forcibly than that of an
undistinguished multitude. Few deaths are so prominent, and therefore
few produce such widespread compassion, as those of conspicuous
criminals. It is no exaggeration to say that the death of an
'interesting' murderer will often arouse much stronger feelings than
were ever excited by the death of his victim; or by the deaths of brave
soldiers who perished by disease or by the sword in some obscure
expedition in a remote country. This mode of judgment acts promptly upon
conduct. The humanitarian spirit which mitig