oom
from a soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the
self-interest of a martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which
he will never enjoy; and the greatest of that great company in all
ages would have done what they did, had their personal prospects'
closed with the grave. Nay, there have been those so zealous for some
glorious principle as to wish themselves blotted out of the book of
Heaven if the cause of Heaven could succeed.

And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant,
the philosopher, used to say that there were two things which
overwhelmed him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown
deep of space, without limit and without end; the other was right and
wrong. Right, the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of
good to self,--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are
determined by the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole
and pole, as light and darkness; one, the object of infinite love; the
other, the object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this
marvelous power in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the
less true for that),--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right,
as it lies somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility
stands of forming scientific calculations of what men will do before
the fact, or scientific explanations of what they have done after the
fact. If men were consistently selfish, you might analyze their
motives; if they were consistently noble, they would express in their
conduct the laws of the highest perfection. But so long as two natures
are mixt together, and the strange creature which results from the
combinations is now under one influence and now under another, so long
you will make nothing of him except from the old-fashioned moral--or,
if you please, imaginative--point of view.

Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
touch moral government. So long as labor is a chattel to be bought and
sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
that he stands in human relations to his workmen; if he believes
rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return
for their labor he is bound to see that their children are decently
taught, and they and their families decently fed