alike dizzy with danger, the independence of England, the independence of Ireland, the independence of France.  If we wish for a proof of this fact that the lack of refinement did not come from mere brutality, the proof is easy.  The proof is that in that struggle no personalities were more brutal than the really refined personalities.  None were more violent and intolerant than those who were by nature polished and sensitive.  Nelson, for instance, had the nerves and good manners of a woman:  nobody in his senses, I suppose, would call Nelson “brutal.”  But when he was touched upon the national matter, there sprang out of him a spout of oaths, and he could only tell men to “Kill! kill! kill the d——­d Frenchmen.”  It would be as easy to take examples on the other side.  Camille Desmoulins was a man of much the same type, not only elegant and sweet in temper, but almost tremulously tender and humanitarian.  But he was ready, he said, “to embrace Liberty upon a pile of corpses.”  In Ireland there were even more instances.  Robert Emmet was only one famous example of a whole family of men at once sensitive and savage.  I think that Mr. F.C.  Gould is altogether wrong in talking of this political ferocity as if it were some sort of survival from ruder conditions, like a flint axe or a hairy man.  Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin.  Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.  But there is nothing in the least barbaric or ignorant about intellectual cruelty.  The great Renaissance artists who mixed colours exquisitely mixed poisons equally exquisitely; the great Renaissance princes who designed instruments of music also designed instruments of torture.  Barbarity, malignity, the desire to hurt men, are the evil things generated in atmospheres of intense reality when great nations or great causes are at war.  We may, perhaps, be glad that we have not got them:  but it is somewhat dangerous to be proud that we have not got them.  Perhaps we are hardly great enough to have them.  Perhaps some great virtues have to be generated, as in men like Nelson or Emmet, before we can have these vices at all, even as temptations.  I, for one, believe that if our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.  I do not think we have passed the bludgeon stage.  I believe we have not come to the bludgeon stage.  We must be better, braver, and purer men than we are before we come to the bludgeon stage.

Let us then, by all means, be proud of the virtues that we have not got; but let us not be too arrogant about the virtues that we cannot help having.  It may be that a man living on a desert island has a right to congratulate himself upon the fact that he can meditate at his ease.  But he must not congratulate himself on the fact that he is on a desert island, and at the same time congratulate himself on the self-restraint he shows in not going to a ball