anagement of
character we are at once met by the initial controversy about the
goodness or the depravity of human nature. It is a subject on which
extreme exaggerations have prevailed. The school of Rousseau, which
dominated on the Continent in the last half of the eighteenth century,
represented mankind as a being who comes into existence essentially
good, and it attributed all the moral evils of the world, not to any
innate tendencies to vice, but to superstition, vicious institutions,
misleading education, a badly organised society. It is an obvious
criticism that if human nature had been as good as such writers
imagined, these corrupt and corrupting influences could never have grown
up, or at least could never have obtained a controlling influence, and
this philosophy became greatly discredited when the French Revolution,
which it did so much to produce, ended in the unspeakable horrors of the
Reign of Terror and in the gigantic carnage of the Napoleonic wars. On
the other hand, there are large schools of theologians who represent man
as utterly and fundamentally depraved, 'born in corruption, inclined to
evil, incapable by himself of doing good;' totally wrecked and ruined
as a moral being by the catastrophe in Eden. There are also moral
philosophers--usually very unconnected with theology--who deny or
explain away all unselfish elements in human nature, represent man as
simply governed by self-interest, and maintain that the whole art of
education and government consists of a judicious arrangement of selfish
motives, making the interests of the individual coincident with those of
his neighbours. It is not too much to say that Society never could have
subsisted if this view of human nature had been a just one. The world
would have been like a cage-full of wild beasts, and mankind would have
soon perished in constant internecine war.

It is indeed one of the plainest facts of human nature that such a view
of mankind is an untrue one. Jealousy, envy, animosities and selfishness
no doubt play a great part in life and disguise themselves under many
specious forms, and the cynical moralist was not wholly wrong when he
declared that 'Virtue would not go so far if Vanity did not keep her
company,' and that not only our crimes but even many of what are deemed
our best acts may be traced to selfish motives. But he must have had a
strangely unfortunate experience of the world who does not recognise the
enormous exaggeration