evil is seen 'something'
ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to hope that
the balance of good over evil is in favour of benevolence; one can
hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain that
there is a most heavy debit of evil, and that this burden might almost
all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others had not
inherited from their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for instant
action.

Even in commerce, which is now the main occupation of mankind, and one
in which there is a ready test of success and failure wanting in many
higher pursuits, the same disposition to excessive action is very
apparent to careful observers. Part of every mania is caused by the
impossibility to get people to confine themselves to the amount of
business for which their capital is sufficient, and in which they can
engage safely. In some degree, of course, this is caused by the wish,
to get rich; but in a considerable degree, too, by the mere love of
activity. There is a greater propensity to action in such men than they
have the means of gratifying. Operations with their own capital will
only occupy four hours of the day, and they wish to be active and to be
industrious for eight hours, and so they are ruined. If they could only
have sat idle the other four hours, they would have been rich men. The
amusements of mankind, at least of the English part of mankind, teach
the same lesson. Our shooting, our hunting, our travelling, our
climbing have become laborious pursuits. It is a common saying abroad
that 'an Englishman's notion of a holiday is a fatiguing journey;' and
this is only another way of saying that the immense energy and activity
which have given us our place in the world have in many cases descended
to those who do not find in modern life any mode of using that
activity, and of venting that energy.

Even the abstract speculations of mankind bear conspicuous traces of
the same excessive impulse. Every sort of philosophy has been
systematised, and yet as these philosophies utterly contradict one
another, most of them cannot be true. Unproved abstract principles
without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then
carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the
whole world. But the world goes clear against these abstractions, and
it must do so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. The
mass of a system attracts the young