ne chastened by a
long education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected
institutions. It is discipline that renders men rational and capable of
happiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed to
attain a beautiful naturalness. Discipline discredits the random
pleasures of illusion, hope, and triumph, and substitutes those which
are self-reproductive, perennial, and serene, because they express an
equilibrium maintained with reality. So long as the result of endeavour
is partly unforeseen and unintentional, so long as the will is partly
blind, the Life of Reason is still swaddled in ignominy and the animal
barks in the midst of human discourse. Wisdom and happiness consist in
having recast natural energies in the furnace of experience. Nor is this
experience merely a repressive force. It enshrines the successful
expressions of spirit as well as the shocks and vetoes of circumstance;
it enables a man to know himself in knowing the world and to discover
his ideal by the very ring, true or false, of fortune's coin.

[Sidenote: Moral science impeded by its chaotic data.]

With this brief account we may leave the subject of rational ethics. Its
development is impossible save in the concrete, when a legislator,
starting from extant interests, considers what practices serve to render
those interests vital and genuine, and what external alliances might
lend them support and a more glorious expression. The difficulty in
carrying rational policy very far comes partly from the refractory
materials at hand, and partly from the narrow range within which moral
science is usually confined. The materials are individual wills
naturally far from unanimous, lost for the most part in frivolous
pleasures, rivalries, and superstitions, and little inclined to listen
to a law-giver that, like a new Lycurgus, should speak to them of
unanimity, simplicity, discipline, and perfection. Devotion and
singlemindedness, perhaps possible in the cloister, are hard to
establish in the world; yet a rational morality requires that all lay
activities, all sweet temptations, should have their voice in the
conclave. Morality becomes rational precisely by refusing either to
accept human nature, as it sprouts, altogether without harmony, or to
mutilate it in the haste to make it harmonious. The condition,
therefore, of making a beginning in good politics is to find a set of
men with well-knit character and cogent traditions,