Right and Wrong in Politics [pp. 265-293]

RIGHT AND WRONG IN POLITICS.
numbers the population of enfranchised citizens. The result
was that even the most scrutinizing philosophers had no types
presented to their eyes or their memories of phases of society in
which common civic virtues and still more prominent civic excellences were demanded of more than a limited fraction of all
the persons in the state. Thus attention was fixed far more on
the signal examples either of virtue or vice in individual citizens
of note, than on the general standard of public self-renunciation
to which even the humblest and most indigent citizen would,
according to a modern standard, be expected to attain. Another cause of this altered spirit of criticism is to be found in
what is sometimes regarded as the greater gravity of modern
life as contrasted with ancient, but which is really the expression
in the world of politics of the ideas of individual conscience, of
duty, of right, and of wrong, to which the training of eighteen
Christian centuries has, with all its terrible drawbacks, given
such a magnificent extension. In the older world duties were
distinct, separate, manifold, and, as it were, dislocated. There
was no tie to bind them together, and none to explain the
connection which the duties of one person, or of one class of
persons, in a community had with duties of a different kind
elsewhere. Thus the duties of a man to his country were artificially contrasted with duties to his family, to himself, or to
mankind at large, and any impetus that might be given to one
order of these duties simply terminated there without diffusing
any fresh light or heat beyond itself. The essence of Christian
civilization and of morality, on the other hand, is the imparting
to all duties a mutual connection, and further linking every
group of duties on to a comprehensive and unique spirit of
obligation and self-devotion in-the harmonious oneness of which
the commonest uses are strengthened and quickened by alliance
with all the rest. Hence,-when once it came to be recognized
in modern consciousness that a man owed a duty to his country,
and could commit a sin by neglecting this duty, the duty in
question was instantly enforced by all the sacred and persuasive
sanctions by which the whole of the reformed society was kept
together.
It will be well at this point to remark upon a few of the concrete
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