The Map of Life. William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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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 proportion 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 Bishop Butler has said with profound truth, active habits are strengthened and passive impressions weakened by repetition, and a life spent in active charitable work is quite compatible with much sobriety and even coldness of judgment 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 themselves 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 without supervision or control. Yet it is hardly possible to exaggerate the calamities that have sprung from misjudged unselfish actions. The whole history of religious persecution abundantly illustrates it, for there can be little question that a large proportion of the persecutors 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 especially 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 untimely death or some painful accident in his immediate neighbourhood, and in general the suffering of a prominent and isolated individual strikes us much more forcibly 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 expedition in a remote country. This mode of judgment acts promptly upon conduct. The humanitarian spirit which mitigates the penal code and makes the reclamation of the criminal a main object is a perfectly right thing as long as it does not so far diminish the deterrent power of punishment as to increase crime, and as long as it does not place the criminal in a better position 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 consequences 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 obtrusive evil, men increase or engender a diffused malady which operates over a far wider area. How few, for example, 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! How often have philanthropists, through a genuine interest for some suffering class or people, advocated measures which by kindling, prolonging, or enlarging a great war would infallibly create calamities far greater than those which they would redress! How often might great outbursts of savage crime or grave and lasting disorders in the State, or international conflicts that have cost thousands of lives, have been averted by a prompt and unflinching severity from which an ill-judged humanity recoiled! If in the February of 1848 Louis Philippe had permitted Marshal Bugeaud to fire on the Revolutionary mob at a time when there was no real and widespread desire for revolution in France, how many bloody pages of French and European history might have been spared!
Measures guaranteeing men, and still more women, from excessive labour, and surrounding them with costly sanitary precautions, may easily, if they are injudiciously framed, so handicap a sex or a people in the competition of industry as to drive them out of great fields of industry, restrict their means of livelihood, lower their standard of wages and comfort, and thus seriously diminish the happiness of their lives. Injudicious suppressions of amusements that are not wholly good, but which afford keen enjoyment to great masses, seldom fail to give an impulse to other pleasures more secret and probably more vicious. Injudicious charities, or an extravagant and too indulgent poor law administration, inevitably discourage industry and thrift, and usually increase the poverty they were intended to cure. The parent who shrinks from inflicting any suffering on his child, or withholding from him any pleasure that he desires, is not laying the foundation of a happy life, and the benevolence which counteracts or obscures the law of nature that extravagance, improvidence and vice lead naturally to ruin, is no real kindness either to the upright man who has resisted temptation or to the weak man whose virtue is trembling doubtfully in the balance. Nor is it in the long run for the benefit of the world that superior ability or superior energy or industry should be handicapped in the race of life, forbidden to encounter exceptional risks for the sake of exceptional rewards, reduced by regulations to measures of work and gain intended for the benefit of inferior characters or powers.
The fatal vice of ill-considered benevolence is that it looks only to proximate and immediate results without considering either alternatives or distant and indirect consequences. A large and highly respectable form of benevolence is that connected with the animal world, and in England it is carried in some respects to a point which is unknown on the Continent. But what a strange form of compassion is that which long made it impossible to establish a Pasteur Institute in England, obliging patients threatened with one of the most horrible diseases that can afflict mankind to go—as they are always ready to do—to Paris, in order to undergo a treatment which what is called the humane sentiment of Englishmen forbid them to receive at home! What a strange form of benevolence is that which in a country where field sports are the habitual amusement of the higher ranks of Society denounces as criminal even the most carefully limited and supervised experiments on living animals, and would thus close the best hope of finding remedies for some of the worst forms of human suffering, the one sure method of testing supposed remedies which may be fatal or which may be of incalculable benefit to mankind! Foreign critics, indeed, often go much further and believe that in other forms connected with this subject public opinion in England is strangely capricious and inconsistent. They compare with astonishment the sentences that are sometimes passed for the ill-treatment of a woman and for the ill-treatment of a cat; they ask whether the real sufferings caused by many things that are in England punished by law or reprobated by opinion are greater than those caused by sports which are constantly practised without reproach; and they are apt to find much that is exaggerated or even fantastic in the great popularity and elaboration of some animal charities.[10] At the same time in our own country the more recognised field sports greatly trouble many benevolent natures. I will here only say that while the positive benefits they produce are great and manifest, those who condemn them constantly forget what would be the fate of the animals that are slaughtered if such sports did not exist, and how little the balance of suffering is increased or altered by the destruction of beings which themselves live by destroying. As a poet says—
The fish exult whene'er the seagull dies,
The salmon's death preserves a thousand flies.
On most of these questions the effect on human character is a more important consideration than the effect on animal happiness. The best thing that legislation can do for wild animals is to extend as far as possible to harmless classes a close time, securing them immunity while they are producing and supporting their young. This is the truest kindness, and on quite other grounds it is peculiarly needed, as the improvement of firearms and the increase of population have completely altered, as far as man is concerned, the old balance between production and destruction, and threaten, if unchecked, to lead to an almost complete extirpation of great classes of the animal world.