of everybody,
and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives
and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other
people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that
if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto
death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons
of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of
anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could
in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great
revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have
been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the
slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is
not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers
from an unrequited attachment to things in general.

It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a
permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or
mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic
words 'good' and 'bad,' descriptive of two primal and inexplicable
sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are
bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things
that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.

Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such
as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in
itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a
bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other
knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except
on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically
planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife
which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good
thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in
the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough
for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us;
what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we
call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us.
We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not
b