Dangers attaching to the unselfish side of our nature
Like most other things its difficulties lie at the begin ning, and it is by steady practice that it passes into a second and instinctive nature. The power of man to change organieally his character is a very limited one, but on the whole the improvement of character is proba bly more within his reach than intellectual develop ment. Time and Opportunity are wanting to most men for any considerable intellectual study, and even were it otherwise every man will find large tracts of know ledge and thought wholly external to his tastes, apti tudes and comprehension. But every one can in some measure learn the lesson of self-sacrifice, practise what is right, correct or at least mitigate his dominant faults. "What fine examples of self-sacrifice, quiet courage, re signation in misfortune, patient performance of painful duty, magnanimity and forgiveness under injury may be often found among those who are intellectually the most commonplace !The insidious growth of selfishness is a disease against which men should be most on their guard ; but it is a grave though a common error to suppose that the unselfish instincts may be gratified without restraint. There is here, however, one important distinction to be noted. The many and great evils that have sprung from lavish and ill-considered charities do not always or perhaps generally spring from any excess or extrava gance of the charitable feeling. They are much more commonly due to its defect. The rich man who never cares to inquire into the details of the cases that are brought before him or to give any serious thought to the ulterior consequences of his acts, but who is ready to give money at any solicitation and who considers that by so doing he has discharged his duty, is far more likely to do harm in this way than the man who de votes himself to patient, plodding, house to house work among the poor. The many men and the probably still larger number of women who give up great portions of their lives to such work soon learn to trace with consi derable accuracy the consequences of their charities and to discriminate between the worthy and the unworthy. That such persons often become exclusive and one sided, and acquire a kind of professional bent which induces them to subordinate all national considerations to their own subject and lose sight of the true propor tion of things, is undoubtedly true, but it will probably not be found with the best workers that such a life tends to unduly intensify emotion. As said with profound truth, active habits are strength ened and passive impressions weakened by repetition, and a life spent in active charitable work is quite com patible with much sobriety and even coldness of judg ment in estimating each case as it arises. It is not the surgeon who is continually employed in operations for the cure of his patients who is most moved at the sight of suffering.
This is, I believe, on the whole true, but it is also true that there are grave diseases which attach them selves peculiarly to the unselfish side of our nature, and they are peculiarly dangerous because men, feeling that the unselfish is the virtuous and nobler side of their being, are apt to suffer these tendencies to operate with out supervision or control. Yet it is hardly possible to exaggerate the calamities that have sprung from mis judged unselfish actions. The whole history of reli gious persecution abundantly illustrates it, for there can be little question that a large proportion of the perse cutors were sincerely seeking what they believed to be the highest good of mankind. And if this dark page of human history is now almost closed, there are still many other ways in which a similar evil is displayed. Crotchets, sentimentalities and fanaticisms cluster espe cially around the unselfish side of our nature, and they work evil in many curious and subtle ways. Few things have done more harm in the world than disproportioned compassion. It is a law of our being that we are only deeply moved by sufferings we distinctly realise, and the degrees in which different kinds of suffering appeal to the imagination bear no proportion to their real magnitude.
The most benevolent man will read of an earthquake in Japan or a plague in South America with a callousness he would never display towards some un timely death or some painful accident in his immediate neighbourhood, and in general the suffering of a promi nent and isolated individual strikes us much more forci bly than that of an undistinguished multitude. Few deaths are so prominent, and therefore few produce such widespread compassion, as those of conspicuous criminals. It is no exaggeration to say that the death of an 'interesting' murderer will often arouse much stronger feelings than were ever excited by the death of his victim ; or by the deaths of brave soldiers who perished by disease or by the sword in some obscure expe dition in a remote country. This mode of judgment acts promptly upon conduct. The humanitarian spirit which mitigates the penal code and makes the reclama tion of the criminal a main object is a perfectly right thing as long as it does not so far diminish the deter rent power of punishment as to increase crime, and as long as it does not place the criminal in a better posi tion of comfort than the blameless poor, but when these conditions are not fulfilled it is much more an evil than a good. The remote, indirect and unrealised conse quences of our acts are often far more important than those which are manifest and direct, and it continually happens that in extirpating some concentrated and ob trusive evil, men increase or engender a diffused malady which operates over a far wider area. How few, for ex ample, who share the prevailing tendency to deal with every evil that appears in Society by coercive legislation adequately realise the danger of weakening the robust, self-reliant, resourceful habits on which the happiness of Society so largely depends, and at the same time, by multiplying the functions and therefore increasing the expenses of government, throwing new and crushing burdens on struggling industry !
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