amongst men would effect a reformation | by spurning him who has occasioned her amongst women too; and the reciprocal to sin. temptations which each addresses to the other would in a great degree be withdrawn. If there were few seducers few would be seduced, and few therefore would in turn become the seducers of men. 70. The common style of narrating occurrences and trials of seduction, &c., in the public prints is very mischievous. These flagitious actions are, it seems, a legitimate subject of merriment; one of the many 68. But instead of this direction of public droll things which a newspaper contains. opinion, what is the ordinary language re- It is humiliating to see respectable men specting the man who thus violates the sacrifice the interests of society to such Moral Law? We are told that "he is small temptation. They pander to the rather unsteady;" that "there is a little appetite of the gross and idle of the public: of the young man about him;" that "he-they want to sell their newspapers.—Much is not free from indiscretions." And what of this ill-timed merriment is found in the is he likely to think of all this? Why, that addresses of counsel, and this is one mode for a young man to have a little of the amongst the many in which the legal proyoung man about him is perfectly natural: fession appears to think itself licensed to that to be rather unsteady and a little in- sacrifice virtue to the usages which it has, discreet is not, to be sure, what one would for its own advantage, adopted. There wish, but that it is no great harm and will is cruelty as well as other vices in these soon wear off. To employ such language things. When we take into account the inis, we say, to encourage and promote the tense suffering which prostitution produces crime--a crime which brings more wretched-upon its victims and upon their friends, ness and vice into the world than almost he who contributes, even thus indirectly, any other; and for which, if Christianity is to its extension, does not exhibit even to be believed, the Universal Judge will call to a severe account. If the immediate agent be obnoxious to punishment, can he who encouraged him expect to escape? I am persuaded that the frequency of this gross offence is attributable much more to the levity of public notions as founded upon levity of language than to passion; and perhaps, therefore, some of those who promote this levity may be in every respect as criminal as if they committed the crime itself. 69. Women themselves contribute greatly to the common levity and to its attendant mischiefs. Many a female who talks in the language of abhorrence of an offending sister, and averts her eye in contumely if she meets her in the street, is perfectly willing to be the friend and intimate of the equally offending man. That such women are themselves duped by the vulgar distinction is not to be doubted-but then we are not to imagine that she who practises this inconsistency abhors the crime so much as the criminal. Her abhorrence is directed, not so much to the violation of the Moral Law as to the party by whom it is violated. "To little respect has that woman a claim on the score of modesty, though her reputation may be white as the driven snow, who smiles on the libertine whilst she spurns the victims of his lawless appetites." No, no. If such women would convince us that it is the impurity which they reprobate, let them reprobate it wherever it is found: if they would convince us that morals or philanthropy is their motive when they spurn the sinning sister, let them give proof a tolerable sensibility to human misery. Even infidelity acknowledges the claims of humanity; and therefore, if religion and religious morals were rejected, this heartless levity of language would still be indefensible. We call the man benevolent who relieves or diminishes wretchedness: what should we call him who extends and increases it? 71. In connection with this subject, an observation suggests itself respecting the power of Character in affecting the whole moral principles of the mind. If loss of character does not follow a breach of morality, that breach may be single and alone. The agent's virtue is so far deteriorated, but the breach does not open wide the door to other modes of crime. If loss of character does follow one offence, one of the great barriers which exclude the flood of evil is thrown down; and though the offence which produced loss of character be really no greater than the offence with which it is retained, yet its consequences upon the moral condition are incomparably greater. The reason is, that if you take away a person's reputation you take away one of the principal motives to propriety of conduct. The labourer who, being tempted to steal a piece of bacon from the farmer, finds that no one will take him into his house or give him employment, and that wherever he goes he is pointed at as a thief, is almost as much driven as tempted to repeat the crime. His fellow-labourer, who has much more heinously violated the Moral Law by a flagitious intrigue with a servant girl, receives from the farmer a few reproaches and a few jests, retains his place, never perhaps repeats the offence, and subsequently maintains a decent morality. avenues to amendment should be closed. Still less ought they to be closed against the female who is perhaps the victim-strictly the 72. It has been said, "As a woman victim-of seduction. Yet if the public do collects all her virtue into this point, the not express, and strongly express, their disloss of her chastity is generally the destruc- approbation, we have seen that they practition of her moral principle." What is to be cally encourage offences. In this difficulty understood by collecting virtue into one I know of no better and no other guide than point it is not easy to discover. The truth that system which the tenor of Christianity is, that as popular notions have agreed that prescribes-Abhorrence of the evil and comshe who loses her chastity shall retain no miseration of him who commits it. The union reputation, a principal motive to the practice of these dispositions will be likely to produce, of other virtues is taken away :-she there- with respect to offences of all kinds, that confore disregards them; and thus by degrees duct which most effectually tends to discounher moral principle is utterly depraved. If tenance them, while it as effectually tends to public opinion was so modified that the reform the offenders. These, however, are world did not abandon a woman who has not the dispositions which actuate the public been robbed of chastity, it is probable that in measuring their reprobation of unchasa much larger number of these unhappy tity in women. Something probably might persons would return to virtue. The case rightly be deducted from the severity with of men offers illustration and proof. The which their offence is visited: much may be unchaste man retains his character, or at rightly altered in the motives which induce any rate he retains so much that it is of this severity. And as to men, much should great importance to him to preserve the re- be added to the quantum of reprobation, and mainder. Public Opinion accordingly holds much correction should be applied to the its strong rein upon other parts of his con- principles by which it is regulated. duct, and by this rein he is restrained from deviating into other walks of vice. If the direction of Public Opinion were exchanged, if the woman's offence were held venial and the man's infamous, the world might stand in wonder at the altered scene. We should have worthy and respectable prostitutes, while the men whom we now invite to our tables and marry to our daughters would be repulsed as the most abandoned of mankind. Of this I have met with a curious illustration. Amongst the North American Indians seduction is regarded as a despicable crime, and more blame is attached to the man than to the woman: hence the offence on the part of the female is more readily forgotten and forgiven, and she finds little or no difficulty in forming a subsequent matrimonial alliance when deserted by her betrayer, who is generally regarded with distrust and avoided in social intercourse." "1 66 73. It becomes a serious question how we shall fix upon the degree in which diminution of character ought to be consequent upon offences against morality. It is not, I think, too much to say, that no single crime, once committed, under the influence perhaps of strong temptation, ought to occasion such a loss of character as to make the_individual regard himself as abandoned. I make no exceptions—not even for murder. I am persuaded that some murders are committed with less of personal guilt than is sometimes involved in much smaller crimes: but how ever that may be, there is no reason why, even to the murderer, the motives and the 1 Hunter's Memoirs. 74. Another illustration of the power of character, as such, to corrupt the principles or to preserve them is furnished in the general respectability of the legal profession. We have seen that this profession, habitually and as a matter of course, violates many and great points of morality, and yet I know not that their character as men is considerably inferior to that of others in similar walks of life. Abating the privileges under which the profession is presumed to act, many of their legal procedures are as flagitious as some of those which send unprivileged professions to the bar of justice. How then does it happen that the moral offenders whom we imprison, and try, and punish are commonly in their general conduct depraved, whilst the equal offenders whom we do not punish are not thus depraved? The prisoner has usually lost much of his reputation before he becomes a thief, and at any rate he loses it with the act. But a man may enter the customary legal course with a fair name: Public Opinion has not so reprobated that course as to make it necessary to its pursuit that a man should already have become depraved. Whilst engaged in the ordinary legal practice he may be unjust at his desk or at the bar, he may there commit actions essentially and greatly wicked, and yet when he steps into his parlour his character is not reproached. A jest or two upon his adroitness is probably all the intimation that he receives that other men do not regard it with perfect complacency. will not pick your pocket the more readily because he has picked a hundred pockets at the bar. This were to sacrifice his character: the other does not; and accordingly all those Such a man motives to rectitude which the desire of preserving reputation supplies operate to restrain him from other offences. If public opinion were rectified, if character were lost by actual violations of the Moral Law, some of the ordinary processes of legal men would be practised only by those who had little character to lose. Not indeed that Public Opinion is silent respecting the habitual conduct of the profession. A secret disapprobation manifestly exists, of which sufficient evidence may be found even in the lampoons, and satires, and proverbs, which pass currently in the world. Unhappily, the disapprobation is too slight, and especially it is too slightly expressed. When it is thus expressed, the lawyer sometimes unites, with at least apparent good-humour, in the jest-feeling, perhaps, that conduct which cannot be shown to be virtuous, it is politic to keep without the pale of the vices by a joke. Fame. 75. The observations which were offered respecting contributing to the passion for glory involve kindred doctrines respecting contributions generally to individual Fame. If the pretensions of those with whose applauses the popular voice is filled were examined by the only proper test, the test which Christianity allows, it would be found that multitudes whom the world thus honours must be shorn of their beams. Before Bacon's daylight of truth, Poets and Statesmen and Philosophers without number would hide their diminished heads. The mighty indeed would be fallen. Yet it is for the acquisition of this fame that multitudes toil. It is their motive to action, and they pursue that conduct which will procure fame whether it ought to procure it or not. The inference as to the duties of individuals in contributing to fame is obvious. 76. The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with much less contempt and aversion than that of a man of meaner condition." It ought to be looked upon with much more. But men of fashion are not our concern. Our business is with men of talent and genius, with the eminent and the great. The profligacy of these, too, is regarded with much less of aversion than that of less gifted men. To be great, whether intellectually or otherwise, is often like a passport to impunity; and men talk as if we ought to speak leniently of the faults of a man who delights us by his genius or his talent. This precisely is the man whose faults we should be most prompt to mark, because he is the man whose faults are most seducing to the world. Intellectual superiority brings, no doubt, its 1 Ad. Smith: Theo. Mor. Sent. "1 congenial temptations. Let these affect our judgments of the man, but let them not diminish our reprobation of his offences. So to extenuate the individual as to apologise for his faults is to injure the cause of virtue in one of its most vulnerable parts. "Oh! that I could see in men who oppose tyranny in the state a disdain of the tyranny of low passions in themselves. I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of an immoral patriot, or to that separation of private from public virtue which some men think to be possible." Probably it is possible: probably there may be such a thing as an immoral patriot: for public opinion applauds the patriotism without condemning the immorality. If men constantly made a fit deduction from their praises of public virtue on account of its association with private vice, the union would frequently be severed; and he who hoped for celebrity from the public would find it needful to be good as well as great. He who applauds human excellence and really admires it should endeavour to make its examples as pure and perfect as he can. He should hold out a motive to consistency of excellence, by evincing that nothing else can obtain praise unmingled with censure. This endeavour should be constant and uniform. The hearer should never be allowed to suppose that in appreciating a person's merits we are indifferent to his faults. It has been complained of one of our principal works of Periodical Literature, that amongst its many and ardent praises of Shakspeare, it has almost never alluded to his indecencies. The silence is reprehensible for what is a reader to conclude but that indecency is a very venial offence? Under such circumstances, not to be with morality is to be against it. Silence is positive mischief. People talk to us of liberality, and of allowances for the aberrations of genius, and for the temptations of greatness. It is well. Let the allowances be made. But this is frequently only affectation of candour. It is not that we are lenient to failings, but that we are indifferent to vice. It is not even enlightened benevolence to genius or greatness itself. The faults and vices with which talented men are chargeable deduct greatly from their own happiness; and it cannot be doubted that their misdeeds have been the more willingly committed from the consciousness that apologists would be found amongst the admiring world. It is sufficient to make that world knit its brow in anger to insist upon the moral demerits of a Robert Burns. Pathetic and voluble extenuations are instantly urged. There are extenuations of such a man's vices, and they ought to be regarded; but no extenuations can remove the charge of voluntary and intentional violations of morality. Let us not 1 Dr. Price: Revolution Serm. hear of the enthusiasm of poetry. Men do not write poetry as they chatter with their neighbours they sit down to a deliberate act; and he who in his verses offends against morals, intentionally and deliberately offends. addressed to the Christian: he has higher motives and better: but since it is more desirable that a man should act well from imperfect motives than that he should act ill, we urge him to regard the integrity of his fame. The Press. 78. It is manifest that if the obligations which have been urged apply to those who speak, they apply with tenfold responsibility to those who write. The man who, in talking to half a dozen of his acquaintance, contributes to confuse or pervert their moral notions, is accountable for the mischief which he may do to six persons. He who writes a book containing similar language is answerable for a so much greater amount of mischief as the number of his readers may exceed six, and as the influence of books exceeds that of conversation, by the evidence of greater deliberation in their contents and by the greater attention which is paid by the reader. It is not a light matter, even in this view, to write a book for the public. We very insufficiently consider the amount of the obligations and the extent of the responsibility which we entail upon ourselves. Every one knows the power of the press in influencing the public mind. He that publishes five hundred copies of a book, of which any part is likely to derange the moral judgment of a reader, contributes materially to the propagation of evil. If each of his books is read by four persons, he endangers the infliction of this evil, whatever be its amount, upon two thousand minds. Who shall tell the sum of the mischief? In this country the periodical press is a powerful engine for evil or for good. The influence of the contents of one number of a newspaper may be small, but it is perpetually recurring. The editor of a journal, of which no more than a thousand copies are circulated in a week, and each of which is read by half a dozen persons, undertakes in a year a part of the moral guidance of thirty thousand in 77. After all, posterity exercises some justice in its award. When the first glitter and the first applauses are past-when death and a few years of sobriety have given opportunity to the public mind to attend to truth, it makes a deduction, though not a due deduction, for the shaded portions of the great man's character. It is not forgotten that Marlborough was avaricious, that Bacon was mean; and there are great names of the present day of whom it will not be forgotten that they had deep and dark shades in their reputation. It is perhaps wonderful that those who seek for fame are so indifferent to these deductions from its amount. Supposing the intellectual pretensions of Newton and Voltaire were equal, how different is their fame! How many and how great qualifications are employed in praising the one ! How few and how small in praising the other! Editions of the works of some of our first writers are advertised, "in which the exceptionable passages are expunged." How foolish, how uncalculating even as to celebrity, to have inserted these passages! To write in the hope of fame, works which posterity will mutilate before they place them in their libraries ! Charles James Fox said, that if, during his administration, they could effect the abolition of the slave trade, it "would entail more true glory upon them, and more honour upon their country, than any other transaction in which they could be engaged." 1 If this be true (and who will dispute it?) ministers usually provide very ill for their reputation with posterity. How anxiously devoted to measures comparatively insignificant! How phlegmatic respecting those calls of humanity and public principle, a regard of which will alone secure the permanent honours of the world! It may safely be relied upon that "much more unperish-dividuals. Of some daily papers the number able is the greatness of goodness than the greatness of power," or the greatness of talent. And the difference will progressively increase. If, as there is reason to believe, the moral condition of mankind will improve, their estimate of the good portion of a great man's character will be enhanced, and their reprobation of the bad will become more intense until at length it will perhaps be found, respecting some of those who now receive the applauses of the world, that the balance of public opinion is against them, and that, in the universal estimate of merit and demerit, they will be ranked on the side of the latter. These motives to virtue in great men are not 1 Fell's Memoirs. » 2 2 Sir R. K. Porter. of readers is so great, that in the course of twelve months they may influence the opinions and the conduct of six or eight millions of men. To say nothing therefore of editors who intentionally mislead and vitiate the public, and remembering with what carelessness respecting the moral tendency of articles a newspaper is filled, it may safely be concluded that some creditable editors do harm in the world to an extent in comparison with which robberies and treasons are as nothing. 79. It is not easy to imagine the sum of advantages which would result if the periodical press not only excluded that which does harm, but preferred that which does good. Not that grave moralities, not, especially, that religious disquisitions are to be desired; but that every reader should see and feel that the editor maintained an allegiance to virtue and to truth. There is hardly any class of topics in which this allegiance may not be manifested, and manifested without any incongruous associations. You may relate the common occurrences of the day in such a manner as to do either good or evil. The trial of a thief, the particulars of a conflagration, the death of a statesman, the criticism of a debate, and a hundred other matters, may be recorded so as to exercise a moral influence over the reader for the better or the worse. That the influence is frequently for the worse needs no proof; and it is so much the less defensible because it may be changed to the contrary without a word directly respecting morals or religion. 80. However, newspapers do much more good than harm, especially in politics. They are in this country one of the most vigorous and beneficial instruments of political advantage. They effect incalculable benefit both in checking the statesman who would abuse power, and in so influencing the public opinion as to prepare it for, and therefore to render necessary, an amelioration of political and civil institutions. The great desideratum is enlargement of views and purity of principle. We want in editorial labours less of partisanship, less of petty squabbles about the worthless discussions of the day: we want more of the philosophy of politics, more of that grasping intelligence which can send a reader's reflections from facts to principles. Our journals are, to what they ought to be, what a chronicle of the Middle Ages is to a philosophical history. The disjointed fragments of political intelligence ought to be connected by a sort of enlightened running commentary. There is talent enough embarked in some of these; but the talent too commonly expends itself upon subjects and in speculations which are of little interest beyond the present week. 81. And here we are reminded of that miserable direction to public opinion which is given in Historical Works. I do not speak of party bias, though that is sufficiently mischievous; but of the irrational selection by historians of comparatively unimportant things to fill the greater portion of their pages. People exclaim that the history of Europe is little more than a history of human violence and wickedness. But they confound history with that portion of history which historians record. That portion is doubtless written almost in blood-but it is a very small, and in truth a very subordinate portion. 1 "Next to the guilt of those who commit wicked actions, is that of the historian who glosses them over and excuses them."--Southey: Book of the Church, c. 8. The intrigues of cabinets; the rise and fall of ministers; wars and battles, and victories and defeats; the plunder of provinces; the dismemberment of empires; these are the things which fill the pages of the historian, but these are not the things which compose the history of man. He that would acquaint himself with the history of his species must apply to other and to calmer scenes. "It is a cruel mortification, in searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion." 1 Even a more cruel mortification than this is to find recorded almost nothing respecting the intellectual and moral history of man. You are presented with five or six weighty volumes which profess to be a History of | England; and after reading them to the end you have hardly found anything to satisfy that interesting question-How has my country been enabled to advance from barbarism to civilisation; to come forth from darkness into light? Yes, by applying philosophy to facts yourself, you may attain some, though it be but an imperfect, reply. But the historian himself should have done this. The facts of history, simply as such, are of comparatively little concern. He is the true historian of man who regards mere facts rather as the illustrations of history than as its subject-matter. As to the history of cabinets and courts, of intrigue and oppression, of campaigns and generals, we can almost spare it all. It is of wonderfully little consequence whether they are remembered or not, except as lessons of instruction-except as proofs of the evils of bad principles and bad institutions. For any other purpose, Blenheim! we can spare thee. And Louis, even Louis "le grand!" we can spare thee. And thy successor and his Pompadour ! we can spare ye all. 82. Much power is in the hands of the historian if he will exert it if he will make the occurrences of the past subservient to the elucidations of the principles of human nature-of the principles of political truth— of the rules of political rectitude; if he will refuse to make men ambitious of power by filling his pages with the feats or freaks of men in power; if he will give no currency to the vulgar delusions about glory :-if he will do these things, and such as these, he will deserve well of his country and of man; for he will contribute to that rectification of 1 Robertson: Disq. on Anct. Comm. of India. |