is of
the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries.
A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he
does harm.

In another essay, that entitled "Only Temper," the social side of morality
is again presented. Especially does it appear in that on "Moral Swindlers."
"Let us refuse to accept as moral," says George Eliot, "any political
leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be
determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less
immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert
Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme
in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous
impartiality." George Eliot is almost without exception sound and just in
her moral judgments, but here her theories have made her overlook the true
conditions of a moral life.

Seeing that Morality and Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the
subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing
matter of dispute--seeing that the most famous book ever written on
Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with
political science, or that which treats of the constitution and
prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find
reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself' to no
wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even
respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after
showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction
gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him
for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean
that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the
typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in
chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes
told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at
the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man
lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of these
consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too
much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with
God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest
conduct toward men. With such