and to societies, than the fulfilment of the reasonable, supreme law common to all humanity.
The workmen in a vast, complex factory have received from the master clear instructions, accepted by them themselves, as to what they should and should not do, both that the works may go well, and for their own welfare. But people turn up who have no idea of what the works produce or of how it is produced, and they assure the workmen that they should cease to do what the master has ordered, and should do just the contrary, in order that the works may go properly and the workers obtain the greatest benefit.
Is that not just what these people are doing—unable as they are to grasp all the consequences flowing from the general activity of humanity? They not only do not obey those eternal laws (common to all mankind and confirmed by the human intellect) framed for the success of that complex human activity, as well as for the benefit of its individual members, but they break them, directly and consciously, for the sake of some small, one-sided, casual aims set up by some of themselves (generally the most erring) under the impression (forgetting that others imagine quite the contrary) that they will thereby attain results more beneficial than those attained by fulfilling the eternal law common to all men and consonant with the nature of man.
I know that to men suffering from that spiritual disease: political obsession, a plain and clear answer to the question, What's to be done? an answer telling them to obey the highest law common to all mankind, the law of love to one's neighbour, will appear abstract and unpractical; an answer which would seem to them practical, would be one telling them that men, who cannot know the consequences of their actions, and cannot know whether they will be alive an hour hence, but who do know very well that every murder and act of violence is bad, should nevertheless—under the fanciful pretext that they are establishing other people's future welfare—unceasingly act as if they knew quite surely what consequences their actions will produce, and as if they did not know
