hesitate before neutralizing its action—now more than ever before in the history of the world are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!
But the postulate that men are rational beings continually leads one to draw inferences which prove to be extremely wide of the mark.[1]
"Yes, truly; your principle is derived from the lives of brutes, and is a brutal principle. You will not persuade me that men are to be under the discipline which animals are under. I care nothing for your natural-history arguments. My conscience shows me that the feeble and the suffering must be helped; and, if selfish people won't help them, they must be forced by law to help them. Don't tell me that the milk of human kindness is to be reserved for the relations between individuals, and that governments must be the administrators of nothing but hard justice. Every man with sympathy in him must feel that hunger and pain and squalor must be prevented, and that, if private agencies do not suffice, then public agencies must be established."
Such is the kind of response which I expect to be made by nine out of ten. In some of them it will doubtless result from a fellow-feeling so acute that they can not contemplate human misery without an impatience which excludes all thought of remote results. Concerning the susceptibilities of the rest, we may, however, be somewhat skeptical. Persons, who, now in this case and now in that, are angry if, to maintain our supposed national "interests" or national "prestige," those in authority do not promptly send out some thousands of men to be partially destroyed while destroying other thousands of men whose intentions we suspect, or whose institutions we think dangerous to us, or whose territory our colonists want, can not after all be so tender in feeling that contemplating the hardships of the poor is intolerable to them. Little admiration need be felt for the professed sympathies of men who urge on a policy which breaks up progressing societies, and who then look on with cynical indifference at the weltering confusion left behind, with all its entailed suffering and death. Those who, when a people asserting their independence successfully
- ↑ The saying of Emerson, that most people can understand a principle only when its light falls on a fact, induces me here to cite a fact which may carry home the above principle to those on whom in its abstract form it may produce no effect. It rarely happens that the amount of evil caused by fostering the vicious and the good-for-nothing can be estimated. But in America, at a meeting of the State Charities Aid Association, held on December 18, 1874, a startling instance was given in detail by Dr. Harris. It was furnished by a county on the upper Hudson, remarkable for the ratio of crime and poverty to population. Generations ago there had existed a certain "gutter-child," as she would be here called, known as "Margaret," who proved to be the prolific mother of a prolific race. Besides great numbers of idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, and prostitutes, "the county records show two hundred of her descendants who have been criminals." Was it kindness or cruelty which, generation after generation, enabled these to multiply and become an increasing curse to the society around them?
