e?" asked Mr. Sam Weller on a
critical occasion. The question embodies the universal impulse of
humanity.

Tracing the feeling back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds of
the lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing a
certain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desires
to vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference a
fellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurts
itself, it gets instantly angry. "Naughty ground to hurt baby!" says the
nurse: "Baby hit it and hurt it." And baby promptly hits it back, with
vicious little fist, feeling every desire to revenge itself. By-and-by,
when baby grows older and learns that the ground can't feel to speak of,
he wants to put the blame upon somebody else, in order to have an object
to expend his rage upon. "You pushed me down!" he says to his playmate,
and straightway proceeds to punch his playmate's head for it--not
because he really believes the playmate did it, but because he feels he
_must_ have some outlet for his resentment. When once resentment is
roused, it will expend its force on anything that turns up handy, as the
man who has quarrelled with his wife about a question of a bonnet, will
kick his dog for trying to follow him to the club as he leaves her.

The mob, enraged at the death of Caesar, meets Cinna the poet in the
streets of Rome. "Your name, sir?" inquires the Third Citizen. "Truly,
my name is Cinna," says the unsuspecting author. "Tear him to pieces!"
cries the mob; "he's a conspirator!" "I am Cinna the poet," pleads the
unhappy man; "I am not Cinna the conspirator!" But the mob does not heed
such delicate distinctions at such a moment. "Tear him for his bad
verses!" it cries impartially. "Tear him for his bad verses!"

Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order of
intelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this the
case with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friend
invariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many people
talk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar proposition
that all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine they
thought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive nine
hundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person or
persons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. "My poor
father was eighty-seven when he died; and he