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greater injury, perhaps, to others, but that on a balance being 

 struck, the good which the action is calculated to produce 

 should exceed the injury ; and, therefore, that on the whole it 

 may be looked upon as useful. This interpretation of her 

 meaning appears to be warranted by other passages in her 

 essay, in which she alludes to motives and to the general 

 good, though her not having included the motive in this, the 

 only one (if I don't mistake) in which a formal statement of 

 that in which virtue consists is attempted, cannot but be 

 considered a great omission. The great consideration is the 

 motive. If an action ever so difficult, and ever so useful to 

 the majority of human beings, be done from malice, for the 

 purpose of injuring even one person, that action, so far from 

 being a virtuous one, will be highly wicked. This I am sure 

 Miss Bevingtoii would admit. What we have to consider, 

 therefore, is whether the fact of an action being difficult, and 

 done for the purpose of causing more good than harm, 

 necessarily makes it a virtuous one. 



In the first place, it does not clearly appear that difficulty 

 is an essential ingredient in a virtuous action at all. Difficulty 

 requires self-denial, and self-denial is virtuous only when it is 

 undergone for the sake of doing a virtuous action. It may be 

 undergone, however, for the sake of doing a very vicious 

 action, and then it is far from being virtuous. Self-denial, 

 therefore, is not in itself a virtue, nor could it make an action 

 virtuous that was not so independently of it. If I pay a just 

 debt, I am doing a right thing, whether I had the money 

 ready wherewith to discharge it, or whether I have been 

 compelled to work hard in order to obtain it. I admit that 

 the endurance of pain and labour may be a certain test of the 

 strength of the virtuous principle in my character. It is 

 possible that a man who pays his debt without any trouble 

 might be disposed to repudiate it if he had a difficulty in 

 procuring the means. But the payment is not the less an honest 

 act on that account. That which tests the strength of a 

 principle is no more the essence of that principle than a spirit- 

 gauge is the essence of the spirit of whose strength it is an 

 index. We must here distinguish between a particular act of 

 honesty and the principle of honesty in the human character. 

 An act done with a view to give a man what belongs to him is 

 an honest act, independent of the question whether the doer 

 of it would have the principle of honesty sufficiently strong to 

 enable him to do it if the difficulty were greater. Thus it 

 cannot be said that one honest act is more honest than another, 

 while yet it may be said that one man is more honest than 

 another, because in the one case we are speaking of what a 



