of organised injustice, cowardly violence and
treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They
cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his
efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how
tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely
we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from
which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

*****

Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled
with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded,
savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow
lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his
destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead
filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably
valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down amidst his momentary life,
to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up
to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and
his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing, with
long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery,
we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought
of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour,
to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were
possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not
stoop.

*****

There are two just reasons for the choice any way of life: the first
is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the
industry selected.

*****

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their
neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to
my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make
him happy--if I may.

*****

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit
by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how
or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must
not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he
must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will
do it, he must try to give happiness to others.

*****

Of this one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and became more
humanised and convers