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That ten thousand, or one thousand, innocent people should die, of whom most, if not all, might be saved alive, would seem at first sight a matter serious enough for the attention of "philanthropists."
To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence.
It most surely supplies all possible repression upon the criminal classes in society.... The aim of reformations is absolutely essential to any good degree of public protection from crimes.... Mr F. Ammetybock, Director of the Penitentiary of Vridsloselille, Denmark, added: I would not dare charge as incorrigible one of the 3,000 criminals who have been confided to my care.... During my career as a prison officer, I have seen many criminals who offered, humanly speaking, characteristic signs of incorrigibility and who now and for a long time had led respectable lives.... I believe that other prison officers as well as philanthropists, can confirm the truth of my experience, and I hope that many will protest against the theory of incorrigibility and place in the balance their experience against purely abstract ideas."
I believe, then, that what seems to the criminal lawyers and passionate philanthropists self-evident, is in truth an illusion, springing from a very shallow kind of impatience, heated in some of them by the addition of a cynical contempt for human nature and the worth of human existence.
"The Bitter Cry of Outcast London" appalled all who read; and leaf by leaf the new book of revelations disclosed always deeper depths of misery and want among all workers with the needle, from the days of the fig-leaf the symbol of grinding toil and often hopeless misery. Not alone from professional agitators, so called, but from philanthropists of every order, came the cry for help.
"Now, Ladies and Gentlemen," continued Crashington earnestly, "here you have the opinions of a man with whom I entirely agree, for, while much is done by philanthropists, too little is done by Government to rescue those who are in peril on our shores.
It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole class of people ought to do is to feel one's self a power on earth, to win a public position, to clothe one's self in dignity. Hence we have an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general of society. Every man and woman in society has one big duty.
That is a pretty tough outrage for optimistic philanthropists to consider when they are addicted to announcing how far our generations have progressed from barbarism. The price of blood in Kerry was not high. For example, the men that murdered FitzMaurice were paid £5 for the job, and they had never seen him before.
The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers.
If a Huxley spent only five hours in the sewers of London, rest assured that he would have found the means of making them as sanitary as his physiological laboratory. As to the laziness of the great majority of workers, only philistine economists and philanthropists can utter such nonsense.
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