Public morality

“ He brought to politics a horror of crime, a vivacity and sincerity of conscience, a humanity, a sensibility, which seem only suitable to a young man. He based human society on maxims of morality, insisted upon a high and pure tone of feeling in the conduct of public business, and seemed to have undertaken to raise and authorize the generosity of the human heart. ”

“ Hence the rule by which men commonly judge of external actions, is taken from the supposed influence of such actions on the general good. To abstain from harm, is the great law of natural justice; to diffuse happiness, is the law of morality; and when we censure the conferring a favour on one or a few at the expense of many, we refer to public utility, as the great object at which the actions of men should be aimed. ”

“ And I now proceed to add, that the strong and deep-settled conviction of all intelligent persons amongst us is, that, in order to support a useful and wise government upon these popular principles, the general education of the people, and the wide diffusion of pure morality and true religion, are indispensable. Individual virtue is a part of public virtue. It is difficult to conceive how there can remain morality in the government when it shall cease to exist among the people ”

“ Morality is the cant and crack word of the place. If you go to our fashionable churches, you will hear the fashionable clergyman preach ‘morality;’ if you visit a private gentleman’s house, he is sure to entertain you with ‘morality;’ if you attend a public meeting, the ‘moral’ speaker will address his ‘moral’ fellow-citizens on the subject of [Pg 139] ‘public morals;’ if you listen to the partisan harangues of our professional politicians, they will conjure the people ‘in the name of morality’ to outvote the profligate antagonist faction, &c. Morality seems to be the great lever of society ”

“ What I have to note is that, in any case, the change supposes the necessity of a corresponding morality in the growth of the instincts, the public spirit, the hatred of indolence, the temperance and self-command which would be requisite to work it efficiently. The organisation into which we are born presupposes certain moral instincts, and, moreover, necessarily implies a vast system of moral discipline. Our hopes and aspirations, our judgments of our neighbours and of ourselves, are at every moment guided and moulded by the great structure of which we form a part. ”

“ and I will add further, that I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man. ”

“ In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the question cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil. ”

“ I propose therefore to begin our inquiry into the detail of goodness—into the particular kinds of conduct which the man wishing to do good for the sake of its goodness is entitled to count good—by considering what is of permanent moral value in the institutions of civil life, as established in Europe; in what way they have contributed and contribute to the possibility of morality in the higher sense of the term, and are justified, or have a moral claim upon our loyal conformity, in consequence. ”

“ from whence it is evident, that the first rudiments of morality, broached by skilful politicians, to render men useful to each other, as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived, that the ambitious might reap the more benefit from, and govern vast numbers of them with the greater ease and security. ”

“ Yet the very inclusion of the category of morality among state concerns indicates that society is not limited in its objects only to the physical well-being of the community, but has traditionally concerned itself with the moral soundness of its people as well. ”

“ And above all, is not our private life as morally beautiful and good—is not our public life as politically right, as indicative of the brightest prospects of humanity, and therefore as inspiring of the highest conceptions? ”

“ You will see men who, so far as theory is concerned, will discourse eloquently concerning human justice and morality, yet they utterly disregard and ignore all moral restraints in their private character and practices. ”

“ Every age had its own standards, and it would be absurd to argue that an act was wrong if it received the sanction of the whole community. It was the communal conscience that determined all problems of right or wrong, and it is still the communal conscience that gives us our definitions of morality and honesty. ”

“ How powerful has always been the profession in guiding the popular mind, in forming that greatest of all counterchecks to bad laws and bad administration,—public opinion! It is the school of eloquence—that, which more than all else besides, has swayed, still sways, and always will sway, the destinies of free peoples. Let a man, to the possession of this noble faculty, add the high character of purity and justice, integrity and honor, and where are to be found the limits of his moral power over his fellow-citizens? ”

“ Honest affections, and common qualifications, are sufficient; and the administration has been always best executed, and the publick liberty best preserved, near the origin and rise of states, when plain honesty and common sense alone governed the publick affairs, and the morals of men were not corrupted with riches and luxury, nor their understandings perverted by subtleties and distinctions. Great abilities have, for the most part, if not always, been employed to mislead the honest, but unwary, multitude, and to draw them out of the open and plain paths of publick virtue and public good. ”

“ They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world? ”

“ The amount of regard for the public interest implied in this recognition, is no greater than is demanded by every system of morals, for they all enjoin to abstain from whatever is manifestly pernicious to society. ”

“ At all events, you have now learned, both as a public character and a private individual, the difference between good and evil. Make but this distinction, that whereas, in political science, though the rules you have learned be fixed and unerring, yet the application of them must vary with time and circumstance. ”

“ But, without dwelling upon this view, we may apply the analogy to society. Whatever morality precisely means, and whatever happiness means, it clearly indicates what we call—and I think that it is no mere metaphor—a healthy state of society. ”

“ I suppose my real idea is that the moral force of the community—public opinion—ought to be strong enough to compel a man to live so that such laws would be unnecessary. His own public spirit, his conscience, or whatever you call it, should influence him to use whatever he has above a certain amount for the common good—to turn it back where he got it, or somebody else got it, instead of demoralizing the whole country and setting an example of waste and extravagance. ”

“ Nothing in the whole field of ethics is more important than for each generation, as it stands on the threshold of temptation and opportunity, to see clearly the basic reasons for our hard-won and barely maintained code of chastity. A reverence for authority, a deep- implanted sentiment, a recurrent emotional appeal, and a barrier of scruples and pledges may keep many within the lines of safety. But the morality of sentiment and authority must always be based on a morality of reason and experience. ”

“ As we follow the upward trend of the lines of the moral evolution of the race we shall hear louder and louder protests against this notion of communal responsibility, especially when this form of human morality has been transferred to the heavens and made a fundamental principle of the divine government. ”

“ We will ever respect and inculcate virtue, both public and private, and deprecate vice in all its dazzling forms. Nothing shall ever appear in our columns to disturb the present public tranquillity, unless we see danger lurking therein, which duty requires us to expose to public view. ”

“ The truth is, the development of character is not in proportion to the development of public and private education. The moral standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty, service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling motive, or at least the conscious aspiration, of active men. ”

“ Every wise man, in and out of government, will endeavor, therefore, to promote the ascendency of public virtue and public principle, and to restrain as far as practicable, in the actual operation of our institutions, the influence of selfish and private interests. ”

“ It is a recognition of this principle of systematic integration of interests and their concomitant obligations, starting from egoism, in the sense of a realization of the relation of self to environment, and then through successive stages of widening appreciation of the full contents of environment to the identification of the self with the community, which alone leads to State or National morality, and will lead, ultimately it may be hoped, to the morality of a community of all nations—that is, a world morality. ”

“ The morality of these and many of my other doings in those days will no doubt be condemned. By no one more severely than by myself—now that the necessities which then compelled me have passed. There is no subject on which men talk and think, more humbug than on that subject of morality. As a matter of fact, except in those personal relations that are governed by the affections, what is morality but the mandate of policy, and what is policy but the mandate of necessity? ”

“ By far the greater part of the morality of every age and country has reference to the welfare of society. Even in the most superstitious, sentimental, and capricious despotisms, a very large share of the enactments, political and moral, consist in protecting one man from another, and in securing justice between man and man. ”

“ They arise, as the individual's conception of the society on the well-being of which his own depends, and of the constituents of that well-being, becomes wider and fuller; and they are embodied in the laws, institutions, and social expectation, which make conventional morality. This embodiment, again, constitutes the moral progress of mankind. This progress, however, is only a moral progress in so far as it tends to bring about the harmony of will and reason, in the only form in which it can really exist, viz. ”

“ Virtue and right conduct consist in those affections and actions which terminate in the public good; justice and veracity, for instance, having nothing intrinsically excellent in them, separate from their relation to the happiness of mankind; and the whole system of right to power, property, and every thing else in society, must be regulated by the same consideration: the decisive question, when any of these subjects are examined, being, What is it that the good of the community requires? ”

“ These institutions exert a strong and steady influence for good, an influence which tends to decrease vice, to make useful citizens of the helpless or depraved, to elevate the standard of morality, and to increase the sum of human happiness ”

“ The more or less skillfully made appeal to the moral sense of mankind—to the broader social will as public opinion—implies a certain recognition of its authority, or, at least, of its influence. Whether this is a definite step toward the granting of a real authority to the broader social will, an authority which will curb impartially the selfishness of individual states, it remains for the future to decide. ”

“ What each man is conscious of doing in his own inner life, society, in its solidarity or constitutional unity, is found doing and enforcing. Organic humanity reveals the presence of the ethical conception and sure lines of its action everywhere. However diverse may be its judgments, there is such a thing as a public conscience that holds up conduct to favor or reprobation, not simply as beneficial or injurious but as being intrinsically right or wrong. ”

“ These demands and expectations naturally give rise to certain convictions in the individual as to what he should or should not do. Such convictions are not the outcome of independent reflection, but of the moulding influence of social institutions. Moreover the morality of a time becomes consolidated into proverbs, maxims and law-codes. It takes shape in certain habitual ways of looking at and judging matters. ”

“ Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely, in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the general good ”

“ But what alarms me and what would greatly distress other friends of good government is the apprehension, that your laudable desire to vindicate and promote virtue in all private relations might be allowed to stand in the way of your making your great influence felt in behalf of the great cause of public virtue in the present pressing emergency. ”