Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/99

 up all his faults and mistakes in life, and publishes private letters of the most intimate and sacred character, can be hawked to the front by certain literary vultures who get their living by tearing out the heart of a corpse. Say that a dire tragedy is enacted,—such as the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, or the atrocious murder of the late King and Queen of Servia,—or, what is to many minds almost as bad,—the heartless and un-Christian conduct of Leopold, King of the Belgians, to his unhappy daughter Stéphanie,—and though each event may be as painful and terrible as any that ever occupied the attention of the historian, they appear to excite no more human emotion than a few cold expressions of civil surprise or indifference. Feeling,—warm, honest, active, passionate feeling for any cause, is more difficult to rouse than the Sloth from its slumbers. It would, in truth, seem to be dead. The Church cannot move it. The Drama fails to stir it. Patriotism,—National Honour,—have no power to lift it from the quagmire of inertia. But let there be a sudden panic on the Stock Exchange,—let the Paris Bourse be shaken,—let Wall Street be ablaze with sinister rumour—and then hey and halloo for a reckless, degrading, humiliating, miserable human stampede! Like infuriated maniacs men shriek and stamp and wrestle;—with brains on fire, they forget that they were born to be reasoning creatures capable of self-control;—their much boasted-of "education" avails them nothing,—and they offer to the gods a spectacle of frantic fear and ignominy of which even an untaught savage might well be ashamed.