erial
Rome.

Hatred generally has a personal root. An injury or an insult received
in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime.
"Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold"; and there are unhappy
natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a
long-cherished grudge. There is an even deeper depravity which
hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because
it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently
because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable. "I
have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without
longing to throw a stone at him. Do you comprehend what she meant?
No? Well, I do." It was a woman who wrote the words.

The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where
all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but
is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause. To this
type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international
hatreds. Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action,
and it is only fair to assume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this
kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted
above. But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit
of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which
started by merely wishing to check a wrong deed may develop before
long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer. Whatever be the
source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic
principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but
it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure
its victim. "Hatred," said George Eliot, "is like fire--it makes
even light rubbish deadly."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred
"steels the mind and sets the resolution." If he had stopped there,
I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen
indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and
"steeled" into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire
to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative
that Sir Arthur goes astray. When he affirms that hatred "steels
the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do," his
psychology is curiously at fault. There is another emotion quite as
powerful as hatred to "steel the mind and set the resolution"--and
the name of this other emo