ars it is not so bad a vice as it is
said to be. Unfortunately though we are all of a mind about the main
opinion that virtue is what tends to happiness, and vice what ends in
sorrow, we are not so unanimous about details--that is to say as to
whether any given course, such, we will say, as smoking, has a tendency
to happiness or the reverse.

I submit it as the result of my own poor observation, that a good deal of
unkindness and selfishness on the part of parents towards children is not
generally followed by ill consequences to the parents themselves. They
may cast a gloom over their children's lives for many years without
having to suffer anything that will hurt them. I should say, then, that
it shows no great moral obliquity on the part of parents if within
certain limits they make their children's lives a burden to them.

Granted that Mr Pontifex's was not a very exalted character, ordinary men
are not required to have very exalted characters. It is enough if we are
of the same moral and mental stature as the "main" or "mean" part of
men--that is to say as the average.

It is involved in the very essence of things that rich men who die old
shall have been mean. The greatest and wisest of mankind will be almost
always found to be the meanest--the ones who have kept the "mean" best
between excess either of virtue or vice. They hardly ever have been
prosperous if they have not done this, and, considering how many miscarry
altogether, it is no small feather in a man's cap if he has been no worse
than his neighbours. Homer tells us about some one who made it his
business [Greek text]--always to excel and to stand higher than other
people. What an uncompanionable disagreeable person he must have been!
Homer's heroes generally came to a bad end, and I doubt not that this
gentleman, whoever he was, did so sooner or later.

A very high standard, again, involves the possession of rare virtues, and
rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been
able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must,
like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

People divide off vice and virtue as though they were two things, neither
of which had with it anything of the other. This is not so. There is no
useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if
any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice
are like life and death,