Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/19

Rh the betrayal and murder of the little boy Eccles, in Liverpool, for the sake of his clothes, by his two companions of eight and nine years old. There was the deliberate plot to entice him to a pond; the throwing him three times into the water as he scrambled out; the final holding him under water until all struggle had ceased. These facts make a striking, but not unique, object-lesson, showing how intelligence may exist without conscience amongst all our appliances of civilization, and the danger of such separation.

Examples of the social devastation produced by official corruption and business dishonesty are too numerous to be detailed; they are seen in what are called civilized countries—in London, Paris, Rome, and across the ocean. The lack of conscience in public and private transactions creates social misery proportioned to its extent.

Recognising, therefore, that this distinctive principle of conscience is a fact of gradual development, that it grows by the union of the moral with the intellectual elements in our nature, and that the far-reaching consequences for good or evil of vivid or dulled conscience in the individual and the nation are far beyond our