Moral Swindlers - Page 2

brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious
scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effective
part of a swindling apparatus; and perhaps I hinted that to call such a
man moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I had
an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen,
noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction, for I have since
heard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tempered, and not over
strict in my views of morality.

I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their full
meaning were confined to women like Melissa. Seeing that Morality and
Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the subject of voluminous
discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute--seeing
that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief
study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or that
which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might
expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of
language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of
village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and
of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous,
rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of
justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one
must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the
European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as
passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since
we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious,
we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching
duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of
these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too
much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with
God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest
conduct towards men. With such a classification as this it is no wonder,
considering the strong reaction of language on thought, that many minds,
dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seek
for the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any private
intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or
seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel
themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so,
and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their
dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?" It is of little use to
theorise in ethics while our habitual phraseology stamps