further that mankind are not too mindful, but that they are far too regardless of consequences, and that they need to have the doctrine of utility habitually inculcated on them. We recognize the value of a principle which can supply a connecting link between Ethics and Politics, and under which all human actions are or may be included. The desire to promote happiness is no mean preference of expediency to right, but one of the highest and noblest motives by which human nature can be animated. Neither in referring actions to the test of utility have we to make a laborious calculation, any more than in trying them by other standards of morals. For long ago they have been classified sufficiently for all practical purposes by the thinker, by the legislator, by the opinion of the world. Whatever may be the hypothesis on which they are explained, or which in doubtful cases may be applied to the regulation of them, we are very rarely, if ever, called upon at the moment of performing them to determine their effect upon the happiness of mankind.

There is a theory which has been contrasted with Utility by Paley and others—the theory of a moral sense: Are our ideas of right and wrong innate or derived from experience? This, perhaps, is another of those speculations which intelligent men might 'agree to discard.' For it has been worn threadbare; and either alternative is equally consistent with a transcendental or with an eudaemonistic system of ethics, with a greatest happiness principle or with Kant's law of duty. Yet to avoid misconception, what appears to be the truth about the origin of our moral ideas may be shortly summed up as follows:—To each of us individually our moral ideas come first of all in childhood through the medium of education, from parents and teachers, assisted by the unconscious influence of language; they are impressed upon a mind which at first is like a waxen tablet, adapted to receive them; but they soon become fixed or set, and in after life are strengthened, or perhaps weakened by the force of public opinion. They may be corrected and enlarged by experience, they may be reasoned about, they may be brought home to us by the circumstances of our lives, they may be intensified by imagination, by reflection, by a course of action likely to confirm them. Under the influence of religious feeling or by an effort of thought, any one beginning with the ordinary rules of morality may create out of them for himself ideals of holiness and virtue. They slumber in the minds of most men, yet in all of us there remains some tincture of affection, some desire of good, some sense of truth, some fear of the law. Of some such state or process each individual is conscious in himself, and if he compares his own experience with that of others he will find the witness of their consciences to coincide with that of his own. All of us have entered into an inheritance which we have the power of appropriating and making use of. No great effort of mind is required on our part; we learn morals, as we learn to talk, instinctively, from conversing with others, in an enlightened age, in a civilized country, in a good home. A well-educated child of ten years old already knows the essentials of morals: 'Thou shalt not steal,' 'thou shalt speak the truth,' 'thou shalt love thy parents,' 'thou shalt fear God.' What more does he want?

But whence comes this common inheritance or stock of moral ideas? Their beginning, like all other beginnings of human things, is obscure, and is the least important part of them. Imagine, if you will, that Society originated in the herding of brutes, in their parental instincts, in their rude attempts at self-preservation:—Man is not man in that he resembles, but in that he differs from them. We must pass into another cycle of existence, before we can discover in him by any evidence accessible to us even the germs of our moral ideas. In the history of the world, which viewed from within is the history of the human mind, they have been slowly created by religion, by poetry, by law, having their foundation in the natural affections and in the necessity of some degree of truth and justice in a social state; they have been deepened and enlarged by the efforts of great thinkers who have idealized and connected them—by the lives of saints and prophets who have taught and exemplified them. The schools of ancient philosophy which seem so far from us—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and a few modern teachers, such as Kant and Bentham, have each of them supplied 'moments' of thought to the world. The life of Christ has embodied a divine love, wisdom, patience, reasonableness. For his image, however imperfectly handed down to us, the modern world has received a standard more perfect in idea than the societies of ancient times, but also further removed from practice. For there is certainly a greater interval between the theory and practice of Christians than between the theory and practice of the Greeks and Romans; the ideal is more above us, and the aspiration after good has often lent a strange power to evil. And sometimes, as at the Reformation, or French Revolution, when the upper classes of a so-called Christian country have become corrupted by priestcraft, by casuistry, by licentiousness, by despotism, the lower have risen up and re-asserted the natural sense of religion and right.