posite political party, than he has with be taken for granted on a great many subforeigners of a party answering to his jects that the individual is to be dearer own. But the oligarchic or the demo- than the State, that public interests, pubcratic party in any Greek city was some- lic feelings, and the like, are to be made thing more than an oligarchic or a demo- of less account than private interests and cratic party in that particular city. It feelings. Except perhaps in such cases as was a branch of a party that was spread betrayal of military duty, it seems to be through all the cities of Greece, and the commonly taken for granted that an oicitizens of one Greek city were not abso- fence, great or small, against the State, is lute foreigners to one another in the way to be looked on as lighter than an offence that men of different nations in modern of the same kind against an individual. Europe are. It was possible that the Greek Even perhaps in the exception which I who wrought treason against his own city have made, the betrayal of military duty, might flatter himself with the belief that I suspect that in many minds the notion he was working for the common good of of a breach of a man's personal engageHellas. It is hardly possible that any ments, of a stain on his professional man in modern Europe who should try "honour," would come before the simple to bring about a political change in his own country by the help of a foreign force could ever persuade himself that he was working for the common good of Europe. The difference then between small states and great has two sides to it. Each has in some points the advantage of the other. I speak of all this because, in the matter which I have taken in hand, I think that the small states of the old time have the advantage over the great states of our own day. I think that the circumstances of the small commonwealth lead in some respects to a higher and purer tone of political morality; but I am fully aware that this advantage, and the other advantages of a small commonwealth, had to be purchased by great disadvantages the other way. If therefore I point out some things in which I think that we might improve ourselves by the model of a far distant state of things, I would not be understood as striving after, or even as sighing after, a state of things which is beyond our reach, a state of things which, if it were to be had, would most likely not be on the whole any improvement on the state of things in which we find ourselves. My main point then is that, in the large states of modern Europe, the State, and the duty which each citizen owes to the State, is not, perhaps cannot be, constantly present to men's minds in the same way in which it was present to a patriotic citizen of one of the small commonwealths of past times. It seems to notion of crime against the State of which he is a member. It is, I think, certain that a crime against the State, simply as a crime against the State, is not commonly felt to be in the same sense a crime, that it is not visited with the same social penalties, as a purely private crime of the same kind. Let us take some instances of all kinds, from the smallest up to the greatest. An old Roman held that all private feelings should be sacrificed to public duty of any kind. Lucius Æmilius Paullus celebrated his triumph all the same, although, of the two sons who were left to keep up the succession of his house, one had died a few days before, and the other was seemingly on his death-bed.* In our time a "domestic affliction " is always held to be reason enough to account for the absence of any public man from any kind of public duty. There no doubt are cases where the "domestic affliction " is so real that nothing short of the iron discipline of old Rome could enable a man to discharge public duties while the blow is still fresh upon him. But we hear the same phrase when we may be sure that the "affliction" and the consequent mourning are purely ceremonial. A man is expected to stay away, not only because his own feelings prompt him to stay away, but because conventional rules require him. Not only would the sacri * See the story in Livy, xlv. 40. He had two other sons, but they had been adopted into other families, the younger Scipio for one of them. fice of private feeling to public be looked | hear about "vested interests." In any on as a social indecency; it would be public reform it is taken for granted that looked on as a social indecency if a man the reform is to be left imperfect, if any did not pretend sorrow and consequent incapacity for business, even when none is really felt. Now we may perhaps debate whether the Roman or the English feeling on this matter is the more healthy; but there can be no doubt as to the principles from which the two feelings severally start. The Roman feeling takes for granted that the State should come before everything else in the minds of all its citizens. The modern feeling takes for granted that the domestic relations come first, and that the State must get what it can after the domestic relations have been satisfied. man's private interest would suffer by carrying it out thoroughly. That is to say, in this as in other matters, public interest must give way to private. This worship of vested interests is, I believe, held to be conservative, but it very often is in practice destructive. It often happens that an institution which has become very corrupt might be reformed and might again do good service, if only the particular men who profit by its abuse were turned out, and better men put in their stead. Reformers of almost any age before our own would have preserved the institution, but would have turned out the men who had made it useless or mischievous. The modern fashion is to destroy the institution itself, but to spare those whose faults have brought about its destruction. The sinecurist, the pluralist, the shameless neglecter of all duty, is allowed to keep his ill-gotten gains for life; his vested interests must be tenderly dealt with; but when he dies, the institution which, but for him, might have been reformed is condemned to perish for his fault. Again, everybody will remember how, in the time of the Crimean war, a number of men were allowed to come home from the scene of warfare on the ground of "urgent private business." It would seem indeed that it was only the favoured grandees who were thus highly privileged; we may doubt whether the private business of a drummer-boy, or even that of an ensign without interest, would have been thought urgent enough to allow his public duties to be left behind. But whether the plea was urged in good faith All these ways of looking at things or in bad, the fact that it could be pub- show a very different state of feeling licly urged at all shows a state of feeling with regard to the State from that which which a Roman or a Spartan commander lighted up the patriotism of the citizens would not have understood. Leônidas or of the ancient commonwealths. The Manius Curius would have made short thing to be noticed is the way in which, work of a lochagos or a centurion who in all cases of these kinds, it is taken for talked of urgent private business at granted, as a matter of course, that the Thermopylai or at Beneventum. Justly private interest must prevail over the or unjustly, the public opinion of Sparta public. The thing is never argued about; would have put those noble and gallant officers in the same limbo with Aristodêmos the Trembler. Such public opinion would have been unjust; it was unjust in the case of Arisdodêmos. The officers who came home were certainly not cowards in the vulgar sense. They had proved their animal courage amid the excitement of actual fighting; they seem to have disliked the hard, dull, wearing work which followed the fighting. But the point is, that "urgent private business" could in any case be allowed as an excuse for forsaking public business of any kind. It could have been allowed only in a state of society which habitually accepts the principle that private interests should come before public interests. It is a bold thing to say, but it strikes me that the same feeling lurks under a great deal of the talk which we nowadays it is taken for granted, as an axiom that cannot be doubted. If it were proposed in any case to make vested interests yield to the common good, the cry of "confiscation" would at once be raised. The use of the word itself illustrates the state of feeling of which I speak. In the dialect of Mr. Disraeli and the penny-aliners "confiscation" always means something wicked. It seems to be high-polite for stealing. But "confiscation" is in itself a word purely colourless; it means the taking of anything for the public treasury. When the estates of a felon or traitor were forfeited to the Crown, and when a magistrate fines a man for an assault or a trespass, the process in both cases is confiscation. The vulgar use of the word is doubtless owing to the love of using a big, vague, Latin-sounding word, instead of a short English word about whose meaning there can be no doubt. But the misuse could have arisen only in a state of things in which people had learned to look on confiscation to the State as the same thing with unjust seizure by a private person. When Mr. Disraeli and other people, in the Irish Church debates, talked big about "confiscation," the implied sentiment, though most likely they did not know it, was the same as that of one of Mr. Dickens's characters - "Rates is a robbery." All these cases are instances, in different ways, of the feeling, a feeling all the more important because it is calmly and unconsciously taken for granted, that private interests should come first, and public interests second. Here, I do not hesitate to say, is a wide difference between the point of view of great states and that of small ones. In a small state, no less than in a great one, the citizen may practically put his private interest before the interest of the commonwealth; he may betray the commonwealth, or he may enrich himself at its expense; but if he does so, he is universally understood to be a bad citizen, one who directly tramples on his duties towards the commonwealth of which he is a member. Conduct of this kind may even be quite as common in a small state as in a great one; the difference is that, in the small state, a line of conduct is always held to be contrary to the duties of a citizen which, in a large state, is, in a slightly modified form, taken for granted even by the most respectable men of all parties. We see the same difference of feeling in another form, in the difficulty, to put it broadly, which people nowadays seem to feel in understanding that a crime against the State is any crime at all. This comes out both in the greatest matters and in the smallest, and, as in all such cases, the smallest class of instances are really the most instructive. To many people, the notion of law as law, the doctrine that it is a conscientious duty to obey the law, simply because it is the law, seems to be something wholly unknown. Take, for instance, such a case as that of smoking in any railway carriage under the old rules, or the worse case of smoking in a carriage not set apart for smoking under the new rules. The act .of smoking in either case is a distinct breach of the law; for, though it is not directly forbidden by Act of Parliament, yet the bye-law of a company empowered by Parliament to make bye-laws is undoubtedly law within its own range. And the act of smoking in a carriage set apart for those who dislike one smoking is a specially gross and selfish breach of the law. The obvious way of dealing with such an offender is simply to hand him over to the guard, just as one would call in a policeman to guilty of theft or other breach of the law. But this kind of treatment seems never to be understood by the offender himself. Sometimes a man will ask if his fellowpassengers have any objection to his smoking, just as he might ask for any trifling favour; he does not see that he might as reasonably ask whether his fellow-passengers have any objection to have their pockets picked. And whether he asks or not, he always seems to hold that the appeal to the guard—that is, then and there, the appeal to law is a personal incivility to himself. He seems to think that he ought to be dealt with in some tender and delicate fashion, and not as the public offender which he really is. That is to say, he cannot understand the public, but only the personal, view of things. But to one who understands the duty of obedience to law, the smoker in a non-smoking carriage seems no more entitled to delicacy or civility than a thief is. If any one should here bring in the difference between moral and positive offences, the answer is that the positive offence, while the law which creates it is in force, is a moral offence. And men act on this principle whenever it is convenient to them. The offence of the poacher is at least as much the arbitrary creation of positive law as the offence of the smoker; yet game-keepers and game-preservers do not commonly feel themselves called upon to show much delicacy or civility to the poacher. Much the same may be said about the common breach of the wholesome rule which forbids railway servants to receive gifts that is to say, bribes from passengers. This is something more than a breach of law on the part of the giver; it is the worse offence of tempting another to a breach of law. Yet every one must have often heard both these practices unblushingly avowed and justified, and that often by men who certainly would not wilfully sin against anything which they looked on as either a moral or a social precept. That is to say, men fail to see that obedience to law, as law, is a moral duty; they fail to see that the commonwealth ought to come first, and the individual only to come after it. - We see the same feeling at work in other small cases, which involve not only breach of law, but distinct dishonesty to taken to piracy - that is, to robbery of individuals. All these are, in different ways, cases of the same incapacity to see that a real duty is owing to the commonwealth by its members, and that each man's duty to the commonwealth itself is higher than his duty to any of his fellowmembers of the commonwealth. wards the commonwealth. The necessity | man has taken to unlawful trading - that of taxation and the right of taxation are is, to robbery of the State who certainly involved in the very idea of civil govern- would not, at the beginning at least, have ment. The payments which each member of the State has to pay to the State as a whole are as much the lawful right of the State as any payment which one man has to make to another. To defraud the State in any way is surely as dishonest as to defraud any particular member of the State. To any one who has a real conviction of what the State These are small matters, such as any is, or ought to be, to all its members, man may have done, or have been it seems a greater crime than to de- tempted to do, at some time of his life. fraud any particular person. Yet it But the same feeling, the same incapais certain that many people who are city fully to take in that crime against the true and just in their dealings with State is a crime, follows men into much their neighbours cease to be true and just higher regions. A few men only are in their dealings with the commonwealth. called on to take part in their own perPeople who would not only scrupulously sons in the great public events of history, discharge every real debt, but who would but every man is called on to form his even be fantastically exact about paying estimate of those who do take part in their share, or more than their share, of everything, will often have no scruple against practising some petty fraud on the public revenue, the pettiness of which is often the most wonderful thing about it. Here again, in another way, private interest is even scrupulously regarded, while public interest is set at nought. Indeed men get so thoroughly into the habit of dealing with the State in a way in which they would not deal with one another that they will do what is really an act of dishonesty towards an individual, if it only bears the likeness of being an act of dishonesty towards the State. Very decent people will, to save a halfpenny, put something into a bookparcel which they ought to write on a separate post-card. This looks like cheating the revenue, and so it is. But the minds of those who do so are so bent on the thought of cheating the revenue that they forget that they are also exposing the person to whom the parcel is sent to the risk of paying extra postage, if the unlawful enclosure is found out. So again, people who would not cheat in a private dealing between man and man, will not scruple to bring in a pirated edition of a book. The thing looks so like cheating the revenue that they forget that it really is not the revenue that is cheated, but the author or publisher whose work is pirated. So, to turn to acts on a greater scale, we may be sure that many a man has turned smuggler who would have shrunk with horror from the thought of turning pirate. As lesser crime so often leads to greater, the smuggler often turns into something worse. But many a them. It is part of every man's moral mur robber or murderer is a criminal, but that the tyrant is not a criminal. Because a particular class of crimes is not inconsistent with much that is socially attractive - nay, we may fully admit, because it is not inconsistent with some real private virtues - men leap to the conclusion that crimes of this class are no crimes, or at least that they must be judged by another standard, and spoken of in another tone, from the every-day doings of criminals on a smaller scale. has ordered a massacre or begun an life, who would himself shrink from any unrighteous war. We feel that our purses ordinary crime in private life, may be guilty would be safe in the private company of of public crimes of the deepest dye. We many a man who has driven a land wild feel, instinctively and rightly, that the by military plunder or judicial confiscation. public criminal is something quite differI have myself elsewhere made the re- ent from the private criminal, that the tymark that there are cases in which it rant is not necessarily a man of the same needs the worse man to do the lesser mould as the vulgar cut-throat or cutcrime. I am not now arguing which is purse. But, because the public criminal the worse man; I only say that they are is a criminal of another kind from the two different kinds of men. It is quite private one, because his crimes may be certain that many a man will do a great more easily glozed over, because there is public crime who would shrink from do- often something dazzling about their very ing a much smaller private crime. Two greatness, men go on practically to infer causes, not unconnected with one an- that public crimes are no crimes at all. other, help to bring this about. Firstly, Because the tyrant is not to be conmost men act less from a distinct convic- founded with the vulgar robber or murtion of abstract right and wrong than derer, men hastily infer that the vulgar from a feeling of what is commonly looked at as right and wrong in their own age. A man will do a thing in one time or place which a really worse man would shrink from doing in another time or place. It follows that, in an age which is severe on private crimes but is disposed to look with indulgence on public crimes, men will often feel no scruple about a crime against the commonwealth, while public opinions will make them shrink from a lesser crime against an individual. Secondly, in all moral inquiries we must always allow for the power of self-delusion. It often happens that the greater crime may be more easily glozed over by false excuses than the less. To take the three chief crimes which come together in the second table of the Decalogue, we hold that murder is a greater crime than adultery or theft. But there are many cases in which the murderer may, by some process of self-delusion, persuade himself that his crime is no crime; with the two lesser crimes this is hardly possible. And this power of self-delusion applies with special force to public crimes. A man who is really seeking nothing but his own selfish ends may, by processes of sophistry within his own breast, persuade himself that he is acting from high and patriotic motives; he may persuade himself that his crimes are no crimes, or, at any rate, that they are means which the end will justify. Then too no cause is so bad but it will get some partisans, and the applause and flattery of his accomplices are thus added to the working of self-delusion within his own breast. In all these ways it is quite possible that a man who has nothing about him which would make us shrink from him in private History of the Norman Conquest, iv. 606. The line of thought which runs through all this is in this way perfectly intelligible, but it is a line of thought which saps the foundations of all public virtue, and tends thoroughly to blunt the whole moral sense. We allow that the man who is guilty of a massacre or an unjust war may be a man of quite another stamp from a private murderer. But it does not follow that he is a better man than the private murderer; still less does it follow that the crime and its doer ought to be any the less branded with the abhorrence of mankind. To say indeed, as has often been said, that he who kills one man is condemned as a murderer, while he who kills thousands of men is honoured as a hero, is a sophism on the face of it; for he who kills the thousands may be a true hero, who has never struck a blow except in a righteous cause. And, supposing the slaughter to be done in open and regular welfare, even in an unrighteous cause, there is so much that is dazzling and delusive about war and its accompaniments that we can hardly put the author of an unjust war, though the misery which he causes may be ten thousandfold greater, quite on the same moral level as a common murderer. We may be sure that Lewis the Fourteenth would never have ordered a personal |