iority; complacence, not wisdom; impudence, not power. But the
contempt of the just man for the unjust is edged with knowledge. It
arises out of a sense for things as they are: a recognition of the
breadth and intricacy of life, compared with the pitifully small
understanding of those who propose to regulate it on their own
authority; of the vivid reality and worth of interests that do not
exist for those whose claims are absolute, but who are only the hapless
victims of a narrow and warping tradition.

Many think that the modern democracy is too easy-going; too much
infected with charity. Now it is quite true that it means that no
interest whatsoever shall be cut off through being forgotten or lightly
estimated. The conscience of to-day expresses the persuasion that
there is no stable happiness in any activity which entails cruelty,
which has any other motive than to save. But this is no more than the
full meaning of the Platonic dictum that "the injuring of another can
be in no case just." [14] This sensitiveness to {167} life that is
remote or obscure, this feeling for the whole wide manifold of
interests, is not a weakness; it is enlightenment, a lively awareness
of what is really relevant to the task of civilization. To imagine and
think life collectively, with all its interests abreast, is only to
measure up roundly and proportionately to the practical situation as it
actually is. Upon a mind thus alive to the whole spectacle there at
once flashes the awkwardness here, the waste there, as of an enterprise
only begun. Let me allow another to interpret this latter-day
conscience. I quote from _First and Last Things_, written by Wells:

I see humanity scattered over the world, dispersed, conflicting,
unawakened. . . . I see human life as avoidable waste and curable
confusion. I see peasants living in wretched huts knee-deep in manure,
mere parasites on their own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering
in primeval forests; I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial
perfection; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible
creatures of luxury . . . I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers,
martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me
with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order, to develop
understanding. . . . All these people reflect and are part of the
waste and discontent of my life, and this coordinating of the species
in a common general end, and