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Updated: June 2, 2025
England a commercial country! Yes; as Venice was. She may excel other nations in commerce, but yet it is not that in which she most prides herself, in which she most excels. Merchants as such are not the first men among us; though it perhaps be open, barely open, to a merchant to become one of them.
I spent a fortnight in the little town, where everyone prides himself on his liberty, and in all my life I have never experienced such a slavery, for I had not a moment to myself. I was only able to pass one night with my sweetheart, and I longed to set off with her for Geneva.
He indulged only in two other luxuries: his love of music tempted him to an opera-box, and he had that English feeling which prides itself in the possession of beautiful horses, a feeling that enticed him into an extravagance on this head that baffled the competition and excited the envy of much richer men.
But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.
And we have watched the Crest-Wave, indifferent to all national prides and conceits, flow from one race to another, according to a defined geographical and temporal plan: one nation after another enjoying its hour of greatness, and none chosen of the Law or the Spirit to be lifted forever above its fellows; but a regular circulation of splendor about the globe, like the blood through the veins: Greece, India, China; Rome, Spain, Rome, Egypt, Persia, India, China: each repeating itself as the cycles of its own lifetime might permit.
Dogmatism, said Douglas Jerrold, is only puppyism grown to maturity. This sarcastic wit never said a truer thing. We call a young fellow a puppy when he is conceited and impudent, and we call a man dogmatic when he betrays the same qualities in controversy. Yet every Church prides itself on being dogmatic. Rome is dogmatic and Canterbury is dogmatic. Without dogma there is no theology.
The schoolmaster, who prides himself on having the fleetest foot in the district, has undertaken to catch a rabbit. Trial of speed is made, and he succeeds in two hundred yards. "Theer's none to match the laal limber Frenchman," says Mattha, "for catching owte frae a rabbit to a slap ower the lug at auld Nicky Stevens's."
And as for tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it." That was fairly successful indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows? have got the length of half a crown. A man who prides himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own misdeeds.
Those very miracles of the human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go beyond his last.
Thus too will disappear that dual social system, under which half the population lives on the State, while the other half is independent, and prides itself on its superiority in character, in intelligence and in efficiency. Socialism solves the problem. I do not agree. Under socialism, the electoral system, and, therefore, the party system will still exist.
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