Every one of manly mind, every person of thought and determination, takes sides upon important questions. Those who say they are indifferent which side prevails, are indifferent whether good or evil comes uppermost. Those who are afraid to choose a side, command only the cold respect accorded to cowardice. Those who sit upon a fence to see which side is likely to prevail before they jump down, are not seeking the success of a principle, but their own interests. In most questions—as in business—there is a side of honesty and a side of fraud. Some do not take either separately, thinking they can better take both at discretion. If they profit by their dexterous duplicity, they command no regard. Some persons have no fervour for the right, and would rather see the wrong prevail than take the trouble to prevent it. They would be on the side of truth altogether if it gave them no discomfort, and caused them no outlay. They belong to the large Laodicean lukewarm class, of whom he who sought their allegiance said he would "spue them out of his mouth." Not a pleasant simile, but it is not mine. It shows that no one is enthusiastic about those who are undecided where decision interferes with advancement. If the selfish, or the politic, or the supine do not care to take sides with right, they have no cause to complain if the triumph of wrong involves them in discredit or disaster. But whatever be their fate, I am not concerned with them. What I am concerned with is the omission of all information of what may follow to him who shall take the right side. These consequences ought never to be out of sight.
It is too often forgotten that in this world virtue has its price as well as vice, and neither can be bought cheap. Vice can be bought on the "hire system," by which a person gets into debt pleasantly—which introduces shiftlessness into life. Wrong is a money-lender, whose concealed charges and heavy interest have to be paid one day at the peril of ruin. Right doing may be said to pay as it goes along, which implies conscience, effort, and often sacrifice of some immediate pleasure. But independence lies that way, and no other. Right principle incurs no deferred obligation. Debt is a chain by which the debtor binds himself to someone else. The connection may be disregarded, but the chain can never be broken, except by restitution. Many persons are beguiled into doing right under the impression that it is as pleasant as doing wrong. This is not so, and the concealment of the fact has injurious consequences. When a person who has been, as it were, betrayed into virtue, without being instructed as to the inconvenience which may attend it, when he encounters them, he suspects he has been imposed upon, and thinks he had better give vice a turn. It was this that made Huxley declare that the hardest as well as the most useful lesson a man could learn, was to do that which he ought to do, whether he liked it or not. Character, which can be trusted, comes that way, and that way alone. He who enters on that path reaps reward daily in the pleasure and strength which duty imparts, while sooner or later follow advantage and honour. The most useful character George Eliot drew was that of Tito, who was wrecked because he had no sense that there was strength and safety in truth. The only strength he trusted to lay in his ingenuity and dissimulation. The world is pretty full of Titos, who all come to one end, and nobody mourns them.
A few instances may be relevantly given in which rightness has been attended by disadvantages, when wrongness appeared to have none—yet wrongness was found to bring great unpleasantness in the end.
When there were petitions before the House of Commons to change the oath which excluded Jews, and petitions to permit persons to make affirmations who had conscientious objections to taking an oath, it was represented to me that if both claims were kept before Parliament at the same time both would be rejected. The Jewish claim was the older, and concerned the enfranchisement of a race. I therefore caused the omission for several years of any petition for affirmation—though my disability of being unable to take the oath excluded me from justice and rendered me an outlaw.
When the Jews had obtained their relief, Sir Julian Goldsmid, a Jew, became a candidate at Brighton. Mr. Matthews, a political friend of mine in the town, went to Sir Julian and asked whether, as Mr. Holyoake and those of his way of thinking had deferred their claim for affirmation that the Jews might become eligible for Parliament, would he vote for the Affirmation Bill? He said, "No! he would not" Mr. Matthews then wrote to ask me whether he and others who were in favour of Affirmation should vote for Sir Julian. I answered, "Certainly, if he in other respects was the best candidate before the constituency. However strongly we might be persuaded our own claim was just, we had no right to prefer it to the general interest of the State."
Speaking one night with Mr. John Morley when we both happened to be guests of Mr. Chamberlain at Highbury, Birmingham, I remarked that Cobden and Bright, without intending it, had introduced more immorality into politics than any other politicians in my time. Mr. Morley naturally demanded to be informed when, and in what way. I answered, "When they advised electors to vote for any candidate, irrespective of their political opinion, who would vote against the Corn Laws. This incited every party to vote for its own hand—the priest for the church, the brewers for the barrel, and the teetotalers for the teapot, the anti-vaccinators for those who were against the lancet. Even women proposed to vote for any candidate who would give them the suffrage, regardless whether they put out a Ministry of Progress and put in a Ministry of Reaction. This was ignoring the general good in favour of a personal measure. The error of the great Anti-Corn Law advocates lay in their not making it plain to the country that when the population were deteriorating and dying from want of sufficient food, politics must give way to the claims of existence. That was the justification of Cobden and Bright, and had it been stated, smaller politicians with narrower aims could never then have pleaded their example for crowding the poll with rival claims in which the larger interests of the State are forgotten. Like Bacon's maxim that 'speaking the truth was so excellent a habit, that any departure from that wholesome rule should be noted.' The Anti-Corn Law League election policy needed noting."
However many instances may be given of the kind before the reader, the moral will be the same. Taking sides involves some penalty which enthusiasts are apt to overlook, and when it arrives ruddy eagerness is apt to turn pale and change into ignoble prudence. Taking the side of honesty or fraud, unpleasantness may come. But on the side of right the consciousness of integrity mitigates regret and commands respect; while the penalties of deceit are intensified by shame and scorn. Many think there is safety in a judicious mixture of good faith and bad, but when the bad is discerned, distrust and contempt are the unevadable consequences. Besides, it takes more trouble to conceal a sinister life than to act uprightly. It is true, an evil policy often succeeds, but the interest of society is to take care that he who does evil shall be overtaken by evil. As this sentiment grows, the chances of illicit success continually decrease. Rascality—refined or coarse—would have fewer adherents if society took as much trouble to secure that the rightdoer shall prosper, as it takes to render the career of the knave precarious.
The point of importance, I repeat, is—that persons should remember, or be taught to remember, that the course of right, like the course of wrong, is attended by consequences. Many who are honourably attracted by the right are disappointed at finding that it has its duties as well as its pleasures—which, had they known at first, they would have made up their minds to do them; but not being apprised of them, when they first encounter inconvenience, they think they have been deceived, falter, and sometimes turn from a noble course upon which they had entered.
Any one would think there was no great peril to be encountered by taking sides with veracity. Let him avoid the sin of pretension, and see what will happen.
The sin I referred to is not the common one of declaring that to be true which you know to be untrue—that has long been known by an appropriate name, and does not require any new epithet to denote its scandalousness. The sin of pretension in question consists in assuming, or declaring that to be true, which one does not know to be true. Years ago this ............