of our having it
otherwise, all pity, equity, love, should be completely ignored by us?
What dignity, what loyalty, can there be in this double life, so wise
and humane, uplifted and thoughtful, this side the threshold, and
beyond it so callous, so instinctive and pitiless! For it is enough
that we should feel the cold a little less than the labourer who passes
by, that we should be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy
any object that is not strictly indispensable, and we have
unconsciously returned, through a thousand byways, to the ruthless act
of primitive man despoiling his weaker brother. There is no single
privilege we enjoy but close investigation will prove it to be the
result of a perhaps very remote abuse of power, of an unknown violence
or ruse of long ago; and all these we set in motion again as we sit at
our table, stroll idly through the town, or lie at night in a bed that
our own hands have not made. Nay, what is even the leisure that
enables us to improve, to grow more compassionate and gentler, to think
more fraternally of the injustice others endure--what is this, in
truth, but the ripest fruit of the great injustice?

30

These scruples, I know, must not be carried too far: they would either
induce a spirit of useless revolt, possibly disastrous to the species
whose mild and mighty sluggishness we are bound to respect; or they
would lead us back to I know not what mystic, inert renouncement,
directly opposed to the most evident and unchanging desires of life.
Life has laws that we call inevitable; but we are already becoming more
sparing in our use of the word. And here especially do we note the
change that has come over the attitude of the wise and upright man.
Marcus Aurelius--than whom perhaps none ever craved more earnestly for
justice, or possessed a soul more wisely impressionable, more nobly
sensitive--Marcus Aurelius never asked himself what might be happening
outside that admirable little circle of light wherein his virtue and
consciousness, his divine meekness and piety, had gathered those who
were near him, his friends and his servants. Infinite iniquity, he
knew full well, stretched around him on every side; but with this he
had no concern. To him it seemed a thing that must be, a thing
mysterious and sacred as the mighty ocean; the boundless domain of the
gods, of fatality, of laws unknown and superior, irresistible,
irresponsible, and eternal. It did not lessen his c