s, our health and our
possessions secured to us. But to secure us these does not secure us
happiness. It simply leaves us free to secure it, if we can, for
ourselves. Once let us have some common agreement as to what this
happiness is, we may then be able to formulate other rules for attaining
it. But in the absence of any such agreement, the only possible aim of
social morality, the only possible meaning of the _general good_, is not
any kind or any kinds of happiness, but the security of those conditions
without which all happiness would be impossible.

Suppose the human race were a set of canaries in a cage, and that we
were in grave doubt as to what seed to give them--hemp-seed, rape-seed,
or canary-seed, or all three mixed in certain proportions. That would
exactly represent the state of our case thus far. There is the question
that we want the positive school to answer. It is surely evident that,
in this perplexity, it is beside the point to tell us that the birds
must not peck each other's eyes out, and that they must all have access
to the trough that we are ignorant how to fill.

The fault then, so continually committed by the positive school, is
this. They confuse the negative conditions of happiness with the
positive materials of it. Professor Huxley, in a passage I have already
quoted, is caught, so to speak, in the very act of committing it.
'_Theft, murder, and adultery_,' all these three, it will be remembered,
he classes together, and seems to think that they stand upon the same
footing. But from what has just been pointed out, it is plain that they
do not do so. We condemn theft and murder for one reason. We condemn
adultery for quite another. We condemn the former because they are
incompatible with any form of happiness. We condemn the latter because
it is the supposed destruction of one particular form; or the
substitution, rather, of a form supposed to be less complete, for
another form supposed to be more complete. If the '_highest good_,' if
the best kind of happiness, be the end we are in search of, the truths
of sociology will help us but a very short way towards it. By the
practice of '_band-work_' alone we shall never learn to construct a
'_true_ Civitas Dei.' Band-work with the same perfection may be
practised for opposite ends. Send an army in a just war or an unjust
one, in either case it will need the same discipline. There must be
order amongst thieves, as well as amongst honest men. Ther