* * * *

=Our insensibility=.--How remote are we from that delicate sensibility
which responds to evil by suffering and to the good perceived in
others as it were miraculously, by a feeling of pleasure! In our
society it is possible for us to live for a long time with a criminal,
to esteem him, press his hand, etc., until he is at last exposed by
the scandalous discovery of his misdeeds. Then we say: "Who would have
thought it? He always seemed an excellent person."

And yet it is impossible that the criminal showed no signs, no
perversities of feeling, no heartlessness which should have revealed
him to us from the outset. No one will say that we ought all to become
wonderful aesthetes like the Greek sculptors, or as sensitive as the
saints; but if we admit that it is a barbarous thing to pass by the
beauties of art without perceiving them; that it is the mark of
defective civilization to confound horrible coarseness and monstrosity
with ideal beauty, to be unable to distinguish the strident noise of
the tram-car wheels, or the deafening crash of ill-tuned instruments
from the harmonies of Bellini or Wagner; that each of us would blush
for such insensibility, and would conceal it--how is it we do not
perceive that such obtuseness is habitual to us in moral matters? We
see that we are capable of confusing virtuous persons and criminals,
without any foreboding. How is it that so often in the case of
judicial errors, the voice of the innocent did not resound in our
ears, although his trial was a public one, and we allowed him to
languish in prison for years? How is it that goodness should be so
obscure a thing that we confound it with prosperity? How is it that
those rich men of whom the gospel says "Woe unto you, rich men, for ye
have your reward," can think of "improving the morals" of the poor,
without any examination of their own moral lives or the lives of those
belonging to them? almost as if they believed that the rich are
essentially good and the poor essentially bad.

If such darkness as this reigned in the intellectual field, we should
be unable to conceive the form of madness which would present itself
to our eyes. There are confusions in the moral field which it is
impossible to imagine in any other domain of life. If some day the
youth of the nations, more clear-sighted than those of to-day, hear
that the Christmas feast was kept on the battlefields of the European
war, they will understand the