224 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. IX 



to hanging, and the duty of society is to see that they 

 live under wholesome fear of such punishment short, 

 sharp, and decisive. 



For the people with a keen innate sense of moral 

 beauty there is no need of any other motive. What they 

 want is knowledge of the things they may do and must 

 leave undone, if the welfare of society is to be attained. 

 Good people so often forget this that some of them 

 occasionally require hanging almost as much as the bad. 



If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under 

 due limitations) obeyed ; why the few who are steered by 

 it move the mass in whom it is weak ? I can only reply 

 by putting another question — ^Why do the few in whom 

 the sense of beauty is strong — Shakespere, Raffaele, 

 Beethoven, carry the less endowed multitude away ? But 

 they do, and always will. People who overlook that fact 

 attend neither to history nor to what goes on about 

 them. 



Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly 

 man. I have a great respect for him. The force of 

 genial common-sense respectability could no further go. 

 George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet 

 one understands how he c^me to move the world of his 

 day, and Franklin did not. 



As to whether we can all fulfil the moral law, I should 

 say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly incapable 

 of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there are men bom 

 physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are 

 some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept 

 straight not even by pimishment. For these people there 

 is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation. — I am, yours 

 faithfully, T. H. Huxley. 



The peaceful aspect of the "Irenicon" seems to 

 have veiled to most readers the unbroken nature of 

 his defence, and he writes to his son-in-law, the Hon. 



