Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/257

 of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been scientifically exhausted.

The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity, without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature, and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and absolutely bad people.

The peculiar and distinguishing feature of his mind is that life is presented to it in stark and rigid outline. He is blandly unconscious of distinctions; he has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of values, in a word, no sense of humor. His world is made up of wholly unrelated antitheses. There are no shades or shadows, no gradations, no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white, good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime. It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad. If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is time to call in the police. "Whenever the Commons has nothing else to do," said the wise old member of Parliament, "it can always make a new crime."