sures more secret and probably more vicious.
Injudicious charities, or an extravagant and too indulgent poor law
administration, inevitably discourage industry and thrift, and usually
increase the poverty they were intended to cure. The parent who shrinks
from inflicting any suffering on his child, or withholding from him any
pleasure that he desires, is not laying the foundation of a happy life,
and the benevolence which counteracts or obscures the law of nature that
extravagance, improvidence and vice lead naturally to ruin, is no real
kindness either to the upright man who has resisted temptation or to the
weak man whose virtue is trembling doubtfully in the balance. Nor is it
in the long run for the benefit of the world that superior ability or
superior energy or industry should be handicapped in the race of life,
forbidden to encounter exceptional risks for the sake of exceptional
rewards, reduced by regulations to measures of work and gain intended
for the benefit of inferior characters or powers.

The fatal vice of ill-considered benevolence is that it looks only to
proximate and immediate results without considering either alternatives
or distant and indirect consequences. A large and highly respectable
form of benevolence is that connected with the animal world, and in
England it is carried in some respects to a point which is unknown on
the Continent. But what a strange form of compassion is that which long
made it impossible to establish a Pasteur Institute in England, obliging
patients threatened with one of the most horrible diseases that can
afflict mankind to go--as they are always ready to do--to Paris, in
order to undergo a treatment which what is called the humane sentiment
of Englishmen forbid them to receive at home! What a strange form of
benevolence is that which in a country where field sports are the
habitual amusement of the higher ranks of Society denounces as criminal
even the most carefully limited and supervised experiments on living
animals, and would thus close the best hope of finding remedies for some
of the worst forms of human suffering, the one sure method of testing
supposed remedies which may be fatal or which may be of incalculable
benefit to mankind! Foreign critics, indeed, often go much further and
believe that in other forms connected with this subject public opinion
in England is strangely capricious and inconsistent. They compare with
astonishment the sentences that are someti