Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/47

Cost of Modern Sentiment see the children born of and possessed by other women," there were certainly hours—so much she makes clear to us—in which the business of looking after them wearied her beyond her powers of endurance. It is true that Miss Brontë said a few, a very few friendly words about these little people. She did not, like Swift, propose that babies should be cooked and eaten. But this temperate regard, this restricted benevolence, gives us no excuse for wallowing in sentiment at her expense.

"If some virtues are new, all vices are old." We can reckon the cost of misdirected emotions by the price which the past has paid for them. We know the full significance of that irresponsible sympathy which grows hysterical over animals it should soberly protect; which accuses the consumer of strange cruelties to the producer; which condones lawbreaking and vindicates the lawbreaker; which admits no difference between 31