William Edward Hartpole Lecky

“ But in the long run, under free governments, political systems and measures must be adjusted to the wishes of the various sections of the people, and this adjustment is the great work of statesmanship. In judging a proposed measure a statesman must continually ask himself whether the country is ripe for it—whether its introduction, however desirable it might be, would not be premature, as public opinion is not yet prepared for it?—whether, even though it be a bad measure, it is not on the whole better to vote for it, as the nation manifestly desires it? ”

“ War is not, and never can be, a mere passionless discharge of a painful duty. It is in its essence, and it is a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise among great masses of men the destructive and combative passions—passions as fierce and as malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to its death or the tiger springs upon its prey. Destruction is one of its chief ends. Deception is one of its chief means, and one of the great arts of skilful generalship is to deceive in order to destroy. ”

“ How far is a statesman who sees, or thinks he sees, some crushing danger from an aggressive foreign Power impending over his country, justified in anticipating that danger, and at a convenient moment and without any immediate provocation forcing on a war? How far is it his right or his duty to sacrifice the lives of his people through humanitarian motives, for the redress of some flagrant wrong with which he is under no treaty obligation to interfere? ”

“ How often do painful diseases lurk in germ in the body which would have produced unspeakable misery if an early and perhaps a painless death had not anticipated their development! How often do mistakes and misfortunes cloud the evening and mar the beauty of a noble life, or moral infirmities, unperceived in youth or early manhood, break out before the day is over! Who is there who has not often said to himself as he looked back on a completed life, how much happier it would have been had it ended sooner? 'Give us timely death' is in truth one of the best prayers that man can pray. ”

“ But the amount of pure and almost spontaneous malevolence in the world is probably far greater than we at first imagine. In public life the workings of this side of human nature are at once disclosed and magnified, like the figures thrown by a magic lantern on a screen, to a scale which it is impossible to overlook. No one, for example, can study the anonymous press without perceiving how large a part of it is employed systematically, persistently and deliberately in fostering class, or race, or international hatreds, and often in circulating falsehoods to attain this end. ”

“ But the time comes when children have grown into maturity, and when it becomes desirable that a younger generation should take the government of the world, should inherit its wealth, its power, its dignities, its many means of influence and enjoyment; and this cannot be fully done till the older generation is laid to rest. Often, indeed, old age, when it is free from grave infirmities and from great trials and privations, is the most honoured, the most tranquil, and perhaps on the whole the happiest period of life. ”

“ In the eyes of multitudes the highest conception of a saintly life consisted largely if not mainly in complete detachment from secular interests and affections. No type was more admired, and no type was ever more completely severed from all active duties and all human relations than that of the saint of the desert or of the monk of one of the contemplative orders. To die to the world; to become indifferent to its aims, interests and pleasures; to measure all things by a standard wholly different from human happiness, to live habitually for another life was the constant teaching of the saints. ”

“ There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.
It has often seemed to me that diversities of taste throw much light on the basis of character. Why is it that the same dish gives one man keen pleasure and to another is loathsome and repulsive? To this simple question no real answer can be given. It is a fact of our nature that one fruit, or meat, or drink will give pleasure to one palate and none whatever to another. ”

“ Political crimes which a false and sickly sentiment so readily condones are conspicuous among them. Men who have been gambling for wealth and power with the lives and fortunes of multitudes; men who for their own personal ambition are prepared to sacrifice the most vital interests of their country; men who in time of great national danger and excitement deliberately launch falsehood after falsehood in the public press in the well-founded conviction that they will do their evil work before they can be contradicted, may be met shameless, and almost uncensured, in Parliaments and drawing-rooms. ”

“ After all that can be said, most men are reluctant to look Time in the face. The close of the year or a birthday is to them merely a time of revelry, into which they enter in order to turn away from depressing thought. They shrink from what seems to them the dreary truth, that they are drifting to a dark abyss. To many the milestones along the path of life are tombstones, every epoch being mainly associated in their memories with a death. ”

“ By a too common illusion of the imagination, men picture themselves as consciously dead,—going through the process of corruption, and aware of it; imprisoned with the knowledge of the fact in the most hideous of dungeons. Endeavour earnestly to erase this illusion from your mind, for it lies at the root of the fear of death, and it is one of the worst sides of mediæval and of much modern teaching and art that it tends to strengthen it. Nothing, if we truly realise it, is less real than the grave. ”

“ One of the great differences between childhood and manhood is that we come to like our work more than our play. It becomes to us, if not the chief pleasure, at least the chief interest of our lives, and even when it is not this, an essential condition of our happiness. Few lives produce so little happiness as those that are aimless and unoccupied. Apart from all considerations of right and wrong, one of the first conditions of a happy life is that it should be a full and busy one, directed to the attainment of aims outside ourselves. ”

“ Beauty will continue to be a delight, though with much diminished power, but grace and the charm of manner will retain their full attraction to the last. They brighten in innumerable ways the little things of life, and life is mainly made up of little things, exposed to petty frictions, and requiring small decisions and small sacrifices. Wide interests and large appreciations are, in the marriage relation, more important than any great constructive or creative talent, and the power to soothe, to sympathise, to counsel, and to endure, than the highest qualities of the hero or the saint. ”

“ But the first great rule is that we must do something—that life must have a purpose and an aim—that work should be not merely occasional and spasmodic, but steady and continuous. Pleasure is a jewel which will only retain its lustre when it is in a setting of work, and a vacant life is one of the worst of pains, though the islands of leisure that stud a crowded, well-occupied life may be among the things to which we look back with the greatest delight. ”

“ The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures, however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better things, exercise an injurious influence on character. ”

“ Ambition is the luxury of the happy. It is sometimes, but more rarely, the consolation and distraction of the wretched; but most of those who have trodden its paths, if they deal honestly with themselves, will acknowledge that the gravest disappointments of public life dwindle into insignificance compared with the poignancy of suffering endured at the deathbed of a wife or of a child, and that within the small circle of a family life they have [Pg 24] found more real happiness than the applause of nations could ever give. ”

“ No real believer in free-will will hold that man is an absolute slave to his desires. No man who knows the world will deny that with average man the strongest passion or desire will prevail—happy when that desire is not a vice.
Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life. ”

“ The standard of comfort in mere material things is now so high in well-to-do households that to a healthy nature the millionaire can add little to it. Perhaps among the pleasures of wealth that which has the strongest influence is a country place, especially when it brings with it old remembrances, and associations that appeal powerfully to the affections and the imagination. More than any other inanimate thing it throws its tendrils round the human heart and becomes the object of a deep and lasting affection. ”

“ It is easy to conceive circumstances not widely different from those of actual life that would, if not altogether, at least very largely, take from death the gloom that commonly surrounds it. If all the members of the human race died either before two or after seventy; if death was in all cases the swift and painless thing that it is with many; and if the old man always left behind him children to perpetuate his name, his memory, and his thoughts, Death, though it might still seem a sad thing, would certainly not excite the feelings it now so often produces. ”

“ Death was chiefly represented as rest; as the close of a banquet; as the universal law of nature which befalls all living beings, though the immense majority encounter it at an earlier period than man. It was thought of simply as sleep—dreamless, undisturbed sleep—the final release from all the sorrows, sufferings, anxieties, labours, and longings of life. ”

“ The truth is there are elements in human nature which many moralists might wish to be absent, as they are very easily turned in the direction of vice, but which at the same time are inherent in our being, and, if rightly understood, are essential elements of human progress. The love of excitement and adventure; the fierce combative instinct that delights in danger, in struggle, and even in destruction; the restless ambition that seeks with an insatiable longing to better its position and to climb heights that are yet unscaled ”

“ It is, I think, a healthy tendency that is leading men in our own generation to turn away as much as possible from the signs and the contemplation of death. The pomp and elaboration of funerals; protracted mournings surrounding us with the gloom of an ostentatious and artificial sorrow; above all, the long suspension of those active habits which nature intended to be the chief medicine of grief, are things which at least in the English-speaking world are manifestly declining. We should try to think of those who have passed away as they were at their best, and not in sickness or in decay. ”

“ But while the tastes which require physical strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life ”

“ But every one can in some measure learn the lesson of self-sacrifice, practise what is right, correct or at least mitigate his dominant faults. What fine examples of self-sacrifice, quiet courage, resignation in misfortune, patient performance of painful duty, magnanimity and forgiveness under injury may be often found among those who are intellectually the most commonplace!
The insidious growth of selfishness is a disease against which men should be most on their guard; but it is a grave though a common error to suppose that the unselfish instincts may be gratified without restraint. ”

“ Every one who is actively engaged in politics—every one especially who is a member of the House of Commons—must soon learn that if the absolute independence of individual judgment were pushed to its extreme, political anarchy would ensue. The complete concurrence of a large number of independent judgments in a complicated measure is impossible. If party government is to be carried on, there must be, both in the Cabinet and in Parliament, perpetual compromise. ”

“ How much of the precious 'stuff of life' is wasted by want of punctuality; by want of method involving superfluous and repeated effort; by want of measure prolonging things that are pleasurable or profitable in moderation to the point of weariness, satiety, and extravagance; by want of selection dwelling too much on the useless or the unimportant; by want of intensity, growing out of a nature that is listless and apathetic both in work and pleasure. Time is, in one sense, the most elastic of things. ”

“ Then came a change,—a year or two with a crippled wing—life, though not abjectly wretched, on the whole a burden, and then the end. You can easily conceive—you can ardently desire—a better lot, but judge fairly the lights and shades of what has been. Does not the happiness on the whole exceed the evil? ”

“ The love of power, the love of society, and—what is not quite the same thing—the love of social influence, are, however, much stronger and more enduring, and great wealth is largely valued because it helps to give them, though it does not give them invariably, and though there are other things that give them in an equal or greater degree. To many very rich men some form of field sports is probably the greatest pleasure that money affords. It at least gives a genuine thrill of unmistakable enjoyment. ”

“ The parent who shrinks from inflicting any suffering on his child, or withholding from him any pleasure that he desires, is not laying the foundation of a happy life, and the benevolence which counteracts or obscures the law of nature that extravagance, improvidence and vice lead naturally to ruin, is no real kindness either to the upright man who has resisted temptation or to the weak man whose virtue is trembling doubtfully in the balance. ”