To the Same.

July 16, 1870.

... A true morality does not forbid selfish pleasures, except so far as they, in the long run, inflict harm on others, or more harm than the agent himself would incur for them, if it fell on him instead of others. Comte’s “altruism” falsely makes the good of others the sole end, instead of the restraining limit and proper guide of conduct. In the long run, the privileges of wealth — that is, most of them — conduce to the benefit of society; and so the law allows of prodigality, though morality marks debit against it in its unbalanced accounts. . . . Moreover, a certain social and moral rank, involving substantial dignities and privileges, is an order which society confers as a quasi means of payment of its debts; and whoever fills or aspires to this rank undertakes to act upon, and is therefore bound by, a stricter code of morals than mankind at large; and in this way I agree with you. I think that the privileges of wealth might and should be curtailed. A moral aristocracy among the wealthy should admit to its freedom no one who uses his claims on the public goods for costly and entirely selfish gratifications. I do not entirely like the figure of “stewardship,” as defining the relations of the rich man to society. What he, in fact, possesses in our modern economy is the right to dispose, for his own gratification, of a certain portion of the property, the actual goods, which industry is constantly creating or employing. If he refrains from using this privilege, it is the same for the time being as if he had given all his possessions back to society. His money, in the hands of his banker, is circulated by loans; and his houses and lands are occupied and used just as if he did not exist. As a rich man, he is simply one who has the power to take of the goods offered for ultimate exchange as much as he pleases, up to the limits of his so-called possessions. He may consume

these goods himself, or give them to be consumed by his beneficiaries; but he is not properly a steward simply as a rich man. He is more exactly a butler. As the creator of his fortune, or as a business administrator, through whom the wealth is increased by the appliances of industry, he is properly called a steward, and in that capacity is as useful and honorable a citizen as the merely rich man can be. Beyond that, his powers and means of doing good are very limited, nothing comparable to his apparent powers as a benefactor, or his real powers as a consumer. His peculiar duties to society as a merely rich man are chiefly negative, and are involved in the obligation not to do the harm he has it in his power to do, —not to waste the goods he has at his command, and not to diminish the productive use of his wealth by the industrious.

You ask to what times precisely I refer in saying that there were times when the relations of men to wealth were inconsistent with the highest types of character. I really had in mind conditions of society, rather than actual historical periods, but of such as history affords examples. When a title to property acquired by war, or by any form of violence, was regarded as equally honorable with the title of industry, or even more honorable, and when Cæsar reduced the value of gold one-quarter by the enormity of his plunder, — the possession of great wealth could not but be associated with conduct and traits of character which the highest ideals, even of ancient times, reprobated, and which early Christianity unquestionably associated so strongly with the things that are Cæsar’s, that for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven was next to impossible. The same condition of society existed throughout the whole supremacy of Rome, and was the chief cause of the decline and fall; and the advent of the strictly modern era was marked by the change of relation of the wealthy and industrious to the state

and to princely power,—the state henceforward, from being the brigand it was, becoming a borrower and an honorable debtor. In all this period, and even now in India, the noble passion for a better life is seen dissociated from wealth. But now, with us and in Europe, since feudalism and the slave-trade no longer confer titles of property, or none that are not countersigned by a more authentic and honorable authority, the rich man may feel that he is not of the company of those who owe their possessions to the victims of violence: he may feel, and be, of the company of the innocent. Still, his means of positive beneficence, even as a friend of the poor, depend upon possessions more strictly his own than worldly goods can be. If he has not the heart of charity, and the head too, he had much better give his money to be bestowed by those who have; otherwise, his munificence will be only a variety of prodigality. As giving leisure and opportunity for the culture of the mind and heart, wealth appears in the most honorable relation it can sustain to the problem of noble living. . . .

I do not think that the universality and the utilitarian or humanitarian character of the modern types of noble endeavor are at all inconsistent with that concentration of thought and feeling in individuals, which is the condition of hearty, earnest strength of action. When I spoke of the greater concentration and limitation of aims which characterized the middle ages, I was not thinking of the narrowness of individual pursuits, but of the narrowness of the range of pursuits within the conception of noble life. Offices, devotions, opportunities for noble effort, have multiplied since then, and have acquired a more distinct reference to the universal ends of human happiness; but it does not follow that the individual actor now, more than then, must scatter his energies fruitlessly over the whole field they cover. It is one of the constituent elements of the idea of progress that there shall be specialization as

well as differentiation in the development: that is, offices or functions are multiplied and co-ordinated, or adapted as a system to some common end; and all the parts of the organism become more and more specialized or limited in their several functions. The lung-tissue becomes fitted for nothing but respiration; the skin-tissue for nothing but transpiration; the gland, the nerve, and the muscle are each a tissue of general inabilities, with one special proficiency; but all are determined in their agency by the ends of a common life. The common life in which the moral nobilities of the Middle Ages found their ends — in other words, the essential religion of the Middle Ages —was itself narrow, but capable of inspiring with heroic energy every special devotee. It brought heaven nearer to his work; but each workman was no more a specialist than now, — not so much so. The idea for which it is easy to die, if we have only it, is not the idea of our special service, but of its chief end.

I am curious, by the way, to learn from you whether the interest you have in knowing who said that “it is easy to die for an idea when we have but one,” is from the merit of the observation itself, or from a vague consciousness of having heard it before? I remember, with the distinctness of yesterday, having long ago communicated that maxim to you as a saying of the sage Gurney; I thought when I quoted it that you would remember it, and need I say that I counted on the rhetorical effect of the association? Perhaps the vague memory which prompts your question, if that be the case, was just as effective for the purpose. Having shown you what a wily rhetorician I am capable of being, I will go back to the Middle Ages.

The difference between the essential religions of those and of our times appears, as you say, “not so much among the leaders of the world as the led.” The masses of our times are essentially unreligious, or, what comes to the same thing, their

religion is not that of the leaders. The imaginations of the uneducated are incapable of being animated by the enthusiasms that inspire our men of genius. The essential religion of the leaders is not sufficiently sensuous to reach them; and the only remedy I can conceive is the education of the masses.

As to Art, the love of it, except as the result of a special and systematic culture, and as an acquisition of the educated, must grow up in a people with Art itself, and with a sentiment of it as a distinction in which the people have a conscious pride. To be a persistent and effective sentiment, other than a love of the beautiful in general, it must be like a mother’s love for her children, greater because they are hers than because they are beautiful.

And, speaking of the sensuous in religion, the Roman Church bases her power on its catholicity. Is not this “the power of bells and banners over the human soul,” of which you speak, — the power, namely, of the senses over the human soul? The startling, vivid, pungent effects on the senses are connected by an original endowment of our natures with a whole circle of emotions. Terror, anger, mirth, enthusiasm, are in turn excited by them. The first essential psychological principle of the bell or the banner is that which causes terror in the birds or anger in the bull, mirth in the child, or enthusiasm in the devotee, according as other and subordinate sensuous effects and mental associations determine the specific character of the emotions.

You see that I have followed the question-and-answer system, or rather the answer system, in spite of your injunction, “that a letter should bear some impress of one’s circumstances;” but I am not sure that I have in fact violated the rule, since the only voluntary reflections which I have to set forth are those inspired by your letter. Whether I have answered all your questions, or any, in a manner entirely satisfactory, I

have, at any rate, dogmatized enough for one letter; and, to modify the otherwise unmitigated omniscience of my style, I will propound one problem in return.

Tell me, from your point of observation, what is going to be the result of the war announced in this morning’s telegrams.