THE CONSTRUCTOR 



23I 



to be attained. Good people so often forget this that 

 some of them occasionally require hanging as much 

 as the bad. 



If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be 

 (under due limitations) obeyed, and 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 — 

 Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven — carry the less en- 

 dowed 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 vet one understands how he came to move the 



J 



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 born physically cripples and intellectually 

 idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and 

 idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punish- 

 ment. For these people there is nothing but shut- 

 ting-up, or extirpation. 1 



In the early stages of man's history ethics had no 

 connection with theology. 



With the advance of civilisation, and the growth 

 of cities and of nations by the coalescence of families 

 and of tribes, the rules which constitute the common 

 foundation of morality and of law become more nu- 

 merous and complicated, and the temptations to break 



1 II- 3°5> 3° 6 - 



