d of right and wrong, to have so
much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion
of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.
Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much
better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a
reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has
been given to us.

The essay on "Moral Swindlers," in _Theophrastus Such_, clearly indicates
George Eliot's point of view in ethics. She makes those moral traits which
are social of greater importance than those which are personal. She
complains that a man who is chaste and of a clean personal conduct is
regarded as a moral man when his business habits are not good. To her, his
relations to his fellows in all the social and business affairs of life are
of higher importance than his personal habits or his family relations. She
rebels against that deep moral instinct of the race which identifies
morality with personal character, and is indignant that the altruism she so
much believed in is not everywhere made identical with ethics. To her, the
person is nothing; the individual is thought of only as a member of a
community. She forgot that any large and noble moral life for a people must
rest upon personal character, upon a pure and healthy state of the moral
nature in individuals. Nations cannot be moral, but persons can. Public
corruption has its foundation in personal corruption. The nation cannot
have a noble moral life unless the individuals of which it is composed are
pure in character and noble in conduct. She complains that sexual purity is
made identical with morality, while business integrity is not. Every social
and moral bond we have, she says, "is a debt; the right lies in the payment
of that debt; _it can lie nowhere else_." It is a debt owed, not to God,
but to humanity; it is therefore to be paid, not by personal holiness, but
by human sympathy and devotion.

The higher social morality, that which inspires nations with great and
heroic purposes, George Eliot believes is mainly due, as she says in the
essay on "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" "to the divine gift of a memory which
inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the
sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more
respectable and innocent brute." The memories of the past lie mainly in the
direction of nationa