nd blanket
clubs, and accepted cheerfully all the drudgery of philanthropy among
the poor. Most people, I am quite aware, will say that this is a very
noble example of renunciation; so it is, and as such I can admire it.
But is there nothing else to be considered? May not the sociologist
ask whether a man is serving society in the best way by refusing to use
his best gifts in the only direction in which they could have full
play? For many years this youth had trained himself for a particular
part in life which few could fill; he might have influenced the
councils of his nation by his powers of debate, the mind of his nation
by his gift of literature; he should have stood before kings and spoken
to scholars; yet all these high utilities were extinguished in order
that he might do something which a man with only a tenth part of his
gifts might have done quite as well. Think of the picture; a scholar
who never opens a book, an orator who addresses only costers and
work-girls, a writer who writes nothing, a leader of men who exerts no
public influence; and what is this wilful destruction of high faculties
but social waste and robbery? No doubt he is doing good; but would not
the good he might have done have been far wider, had he followed the
line of his natural gifts, and occupied the place in life for which
those gifts obviously fitted him?

This story is a pertinent example of the cant of Doing Good. By all
means let those live among the poor and work for their betterment who
have a distinct vocation for the task; but it is not a vocation for
all. I object to the spectacle of a late president of the Oxford Union
giving up his life to the management of coal and blanket clubs, just as
I object to the spectacle of a thorough-bred racehorse harnessed to a
dray. It is a waste of power. But the Good Earnest People never see
this side of things, because they are afflicted with narrowness of
vision. They admit no definition of doing good but their own. They
cannot see that the man who passes from a distinguished University
career to a distinguished public life may do more for the poor by his
pen, by his power of awakening sympathy, by the opportunity that may be
his to obtain the reversal of unjust laws or the establishment of good
laws, than he ever could have done by living in a slum as the friend
and helper of a small group of needy men and women. Decisive victories
are won more often by lateral movements than by