judges who not so long ago condemned men to
solitary confinement for periods, not of five months, as our own
practice is, but of five years and more. The things that our moral
monsters do may be left out of account with St. Bartholomew massacres
and other momentary outbursts of social disorder. Judge us by the
admitted and respected practice of our most reputable circles; and, if
you know the facts and are strong enough to look them in the face, you
must admit that unless we are replaced by a more highly evolved
animal--in short, by the Superman--the world must remain a den of
dangerous animals among whom our few accidental supermen, our
Shakespears, Goethes, Shelleys, and their like, must live as
precariously as lion tamers do, taking the humor of their situation, and
the dignity of their superiority, as a set-off to the horror of the one
and the loneliness of the other.

IX

THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

It may be said that though the wild beast breaks out in Man and casts
him back momentarily into barbarism under the excitement of war and
crime, yet his normal life is higher than the normal life of his
forefathers. This view is very acceptable to Englishmen, who always
lean sincerely to virtue's side as long as it costs them nothing either
in money or in thought. They feel deeply the injustice of foreigners,
who allow them no credit for this conditional highmindedness. But there
is no reason to suppose that our ancestors were less capable of it than
we are. To all such claims for the existence of a progressive moral
evolution operating visibly from grandfather to grandson, there is the
conclusive reply that a thousand years of such evolution would have
produced enormous social changes, of which the historical evidence would
be overwhelming. But not Macaulay himself, the most confident of Whig
meliorists, can produce any such evidence that will bear
cross-examination. Compare our conduct and our codes with those
mentioned contemporarily in such ancient scriptures and classics as have
come down to us, and you will find no jot of ground for the belief that
any moral progress whatever has been made in historic time, in spite of
all the romantic attempts of historians to reconstruct the past on that
assumption. Within that time it has happened to nations as to private
families and individuals that they have flourished and decayed, repented
and hardened their hearts, submitted and protested, acted and reacted,