e is in reality no choice for you; the
facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to _think_
about this matter, or to choose in it. The broad fact is, that a human
creature of the highest race, and most perfect as a human thing, is
invariably both kind and true; and that as you lower the race, you get
cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity: and this so steadily and
assuredly, that the two great words which, in their first use, meant
only perfection of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable
connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both to signify
benevolence of disposition. The word generous, and the word gentle,
both, in their origin, meant only 'of pure race,' but because charity
and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of blood, the words
which once stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms for virtue.

Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, and seeing that
all the aim of education should be to develop this;--and seeing also
what magnificent self sacrifice the higher classes of men are capable
of, for any cause that they understand or feel,--it is wholly
inconceivable to me how well-educated princes, who ought to be of all
gentlemen the gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose
title of royalty means only their function of doing every man
'_right_'--how these, I say, throughout history, should so rarely
pronounce themselves on the side of the poor and of justice, but
continually maintain themselves and their own interests by oppression of
the poor, and by wresting of justice; and how this should be accepted as
so natural, that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is
used as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to their king,
and not the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his people.
How comes it to pass that a captain will die with his passengers, and
lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its course; but that a
king will not usually die with, much less _for_, his passengers,--thinks
it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die for _him_?
Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not
captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment;--not a man
of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer;--not with the eyes
of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor
boat, of his name being ever heard above the wash of the fatal
wa