THE CAUSES OF PERSECUTION 



It has thus come to pass that, in such commu- 

 nities as England and our own Northern States, 

 the majority of individuals may live all their lives 

 without ever being called upon to take part in 

 putting a fellow-creature to death. Most of us, I 

 presume, have never witnessed a violent death, 

 and know of such things only by hearsay only 

 by reading the newspapers and books of history. 

 The consequence is that a kind of feminine soft- 

 ness has come over our tempers a tenderness 

 which shrinks from the very thought of death 

 and suffering purposely inflicted as intolerable. 

 In military ages any approach to such softness 

 of temper was stigmatized as unmanly, and such 

 a type of character could not flourish, because 

 it was unsuited to the conditions of life in a 

 perpetually belligerent community ; but in our 

 own industrial age this mild type of character is 

 fostered by all the potency of public approval. 

 But it is not only by restricting the sphere of 

 warfare that our complex industrial civilization 

 has nourished a temper that shrinks from the 

 infliction of pain. Productive activity has oper- 

 ated in this way directly, as well as indirectly 

 through restraining destructive activity. Social 

 life has lost the half-brutal, half-ascetic aspect 

 befitting ages when life was for high and low 

 little more than a struggle for existence. It is a 

 trite remark that the American labourer to-day 

 possesses many physical comforts which a medi- 

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