evil remains right or wrong. To rescue a drowning man is right, for such action normally tends to human welfare; if the rescued man turns out a great criminal, or escapes this death to suffer a worse, the act of rescuing the drowning remains a desirable and therefore moral act. On the other hand, if one man slanders another, with the result that the latter, refuting the slander, thereby attains prominence and position, the act of slander, normally harmful, remains an immoral act.

It is a failure to recognize this necessarily general character of our moral judgments that raises the problem of Job. The ancient Israelites saw clearly that righteousness was the road to happiness;1 and when a righteous man like Job fell into misfortune, they accused him of secret sin. Job is conscious of his innocence, of having done his part aright, and cannot understand how he has come to such an evil pass. It would have brought him no material alleviation, but it might have saved him some mental chafing, to recognize that morality is simply doing our part. When we have done our best we are still at the mercy of fortune. Happiness, as Aristotle pointed out, is the result of two coöperating factors, morality and good fortune. If either is lacking, evil will ensue. If all men were perfectly virtuous, we should still be at the mercy of flood and lightning, poisonous snakes, icebergs and fog at sea, a thousand forms of accident and disease, old age and death. The millennium will not bring pure happiness to man; he is too feeble a creature in the presence of forces with which he cannot cope. Morality is

1 Cf. for example, "Righteousness tendeth to life; he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death." "Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord, that walketh in his ways. Happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee."

2 Nichomachean Ethics, bk. I, several places: e.g., in chap. vII, "To constitute happiness there must be, as we have said, complete virtue and fit external conditions."

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the best man can do; and it is not to be blamed for the twists of fate that make futile its efforts.

(3) Are there not, however, cases where conduct which we agree is right is not even likely to bring the greatest happiness attainable; where not only immediate but lasting happiness is to be deliberately sacrificed in the name of morality? Suppose, for example, a politician who becomes convinced of the evils of the liquor trade ruins his career in a hopeless fight against the saloons. He loses his office, his income, his honor in the sight of his associates; he brings suffering upon his innocent wife and children; and all for no good, since his fight is futile and ineffective. Surely any one could foresee that such action would make only for unhappiness, or for no happiness commensurable with the sacrifice. Yet if we agree with his premise, that the liquor trade is a curse to humanity, we deem his conduct not only conscientious but objectively noble and right. How can we justify that judgment?

In the first place, we cannot be sure, beforehand, that such a fight will not be successful. Forlorn hopes sometimes win. We must encourage men to venture, to take chances; only so can the great evils that ride mankind be banished. If there is a fighting chance of accomplishing a great good it is contemptible not to try; society must maintain a code that leads at times to quixotic acts.

In the second place, the fight, even if in itself hopeless, is sure to have valuable indirect results. It arouses others to the need; it stimulates in others the willingness to sacrifice self-interest and work for the general good. Every such honorable defeat has its share in the final victory. The subtle benefits that result from such moral gallantry are not evident on the surface, but they are there. No push for the right is wholly wasted. It pays mankind to let its heroes lavish their lives in apparently ineffective struggles; through

their example the apathetic masses are stirred and moved a little farther toward their goal.

In general, we may say that the belief that virtue is not the right road to happiness betrays inexperience and immaturity of judgment. A moderate degree of morality saves man from many pitfalls into which his unrestrained impulses would lead him. The highest levels of morality bring a degree of happiness unknown to the "natural man." Who are the happiest people in the world? The saints; those who are inwardly at peace, who play their part with absolute loyalty. Even the irremediable misfortunes of life do not affect them as they do the worldly man; they have "learned the luxury of doing good." Of morality a recent writer says, "Its distribution of felicity is ideally just. To him who is most unselfish, who sinks most thoroughly his own interests in those of the race of which he is a unit, it awards the most complete beatitude."1 To him who complains that he is moral but not happy, the answer is, Be more moral! A high enough morality, a complete enough consecration, will lead, in all but very abnormal cases, to happiness in the individual life, as well as make its due contribution to the happiness of others.

Is there anything better than morality?

It is this lack of vision, this immature skepticism as to the service of morality to human welfare, that has fired a flame of revolt in certain minds, a revolt not merely against incidental defects and outworn conceptions of morality, but against morality überhaupt. The declamations of these Promethean rebels make it clear, however, that their protest is but the old fault of condemning a necessary institution altogether for its imperfections or its abuses. Morality has been blended with superstition and tyranny, has been often 1 J. H. Levy, of London, in a funeral oration.

blind, perverted, narrow, checking noble impulses and choking the rich and happy development of life. But it is one thing to arraign these accidents and corruptions of morality; it is quite another to discard the whole system of guidance of which they are but the excrescences and mistakes. This usurping is, of course, also in large part a thirst for novelty, a love of paradox, of practising ingenuity in making the better appear the worse; it is in part a volcanic eruption of suppressed longings and a protest against the inadequacy of our present code to provide opportunity and happiness for the masses. The motives vary with the individual rebels.

It must suffice, however, from among the many leaders of this revolt, to quote that clever but unbalanced German iconoclast, Nietzsche. Typical of his doctrine is the following:1 "Never until now was there the least doubt or hesita tion to set down the 'good' man as of higher value than the 'evil' man of higher value in the sense of furtherance, utility, prosperity, as regards man in general (the future of man included). What if the reverse were true? What if in the 'good' one also a symptom of decline were contained, and a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic by which the present might live at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also in humbler style – more meanly? So that just morality were to blame, if a highest mightiness and splendor of type of man- possible in itself were never attained? And that, therefore, morality itself would be the danger of dangers?"

The point of this tirade is that morality puts a wet blanket over human powers; it is a bourgeois ideal, saving men, indeed, from pain, but also robbing life of its picturesqueness and glory. Many people frankly prefer "interesting" to "good" people; Nietzsche generalizes this feeling. Morality is to him uninteresting, dull, a code for slaves, for 1 Genealogy of Morals (ed. Alex. Tille), Foreword, p. 9.

goody-goodies and molly-coddles. Give him the clash of combat, the tang of cruelty and lust, the tingle of unrestrained power. Every man for himself then, and the Devil take the hindmost.

Shocked as we are by this brutal platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing, tea-drinking, tamely good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us. Stevenson, with his delightfully irresponsible audacity, sighs for an occasional "furlough from the moral law"; and there are times for most of us when it seems as if we should choke and smother under the everlasting "Thou shalt not!" But the daring rebel, the defiant Titan, comes creeping back to the shelter of morality with a headache or something worse, and discovers that his Promethean boldness was but childish petulance; that it is futile and foolish to try to escape the inexorable laws of human life.

There are, in fact, two adequate answers that can be made to the despiser of morality:

(1) Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary. It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism, that immorality implies. Our whole civilization, everything that makes human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse without its foundation of moral obedience. The régime of slashing individualism would kill off many of the weaker who are precious to humanity a Homer (if he was blind), a Keats, a Stevenson; nay, if carried to extreme, it would put an end to the race. For who are the weakest, the "hindmost," but the babies! Sympathy and love and self-sacrifice, at least in parents, are necessary if the race is to endure a generation. But even for the individual, the penalties of immorality are too obvious to need recapitulation. If morality is repression,