rivate feelings interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too
much on his guard in such a case, lest his actions be biased
by obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men.
Let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and
to the hour.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well, they are
only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why
give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not
inclined to? But I think again, This is no reason why I
should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much
greater pain of a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to
myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill
will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a
few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their
constitution, of retracting or altering their present
demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal
to any other millions, why expose yourself to this
overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and
hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you
quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do
not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as
I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a
human force, and consider that I have relations to those
millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere
brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible,
first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them,
and, secondly, from them to themselves. But if I put my
head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire
or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.
If I could convince myself that I have any right to be
satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them
accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my
requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to
be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should
endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it
is the will of God. And, above all, there is this
difference between resisting this and a purely brute or
natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but
I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the
rocks and trees and beasts.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do
not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set
myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may
say, e