from brooding over the villanies, real or imaginary, of any individual, but he is almost sure at some step in the progress of his malady to pull himself sharply up. He recognizes that his mind has been dram-drinking. Either he is a reasonable human being, and suddenly appreciates the humor of his own exaggerated view, or he is a Christian, and is shocked at the impulses of his own mind, or he is under the influence of the Christian atmosphere, and recoils before the first suggestion of an act which would cause suffering, that is, from any approach towards making his hatred active. “After all,” he says to himself, “perhaps I mistake the fellow, or perhaps he has mistaken me;” or, “He may be only acting after his nature,” or, “He has a right, annoying as he is in the exercise of it.” At all events, he reflects, and reflection is nearly sure to be as fatal to hatred as it is to that form of rage which carries a man out of himself, and ends in a burst of destructiveness, only innocent when confined to his own china. The man who hates a nation rarely feels this check. He never pulls himself up, for he never perceives that such a process is obligatory on the conscience of a Christian human being. On the contrary, when he lets himself go full swing, he exults over himself for the moral virtue shown in the pace he has attained. It is immoral to hate an individual, but patriotic to hate a nation. It is foolish to be eternally suspecting a personal enemy, but politic to regard every national act as deserving of suspicion. To grudge your cousin his luck is mean, so basely mean, that most men would deny it; but to detest France, or Germany, or Russia for getting a new estate, even by legacy, is positively virtuous. It is feeble to be moved by taunts from an adversary, but if he has a few million heads it is only proper pride, a duty you owe to your country, to be very wrath with his most meaningless impertinence. It is wicked to desire to kill a rival merely because, he has succeeded, but to desire to kill a nation for succeeding is an emotion to be avowed and to be proud of. “I would give a finger if I could kill him,” says the angry man, and the bystanders pronounce him, in their hearts, a malignant fool; but if he says, “I would give my life if only I could destroy the Russian army,” they think the sentiment quite creditable, and describe him ever after as a little violent, but frank and patriotic. If he invents ingenious methods of killing, he is a man deserving of honor; and if he kills in heaps, he is a hero. The hater's very virtues, his love for his country, his desire for the national honor, his indignation at wrong, are all called in to foster his rancor, until moderation seems to himself scarcely less than a crime, and he talks, and especially writes, as if he were bereft of reason. In modern life, hereditary hatred, the active dislike of a man because his grandfather was a brute, is considered foolish, and is disowned though few men are entirely free from unconscious antipathies of the kind, or could conceive of a Lord Ruthven as a benevolent philanthropist but where a nation is the subject of hatred, distance of time matters nothing. Half Europe hates the Jews of to-day, because their remote ancestors executed Christ; the Greeks, who have not held Byzantium for four hundred years, still suffer from the opprobrium attaching to the word Byzantine; and educated men to this hour hate Russians hard, because Russian proprietors, like English proprietors in the West Indies, were occasionally frightfully cruel to their serfs. Nothing the serf-owners ever did surpasses the deeds narrated before the last committee of inquiry into slavery in the West Indies, but what then? So strong, indeed, is this cause of hatred, that we question whether if a people arose who called themselves Carthaginians, English educated men would ever quite overcome an inclination to believe that they were abnormally cruel. Men who hate nations actually read themselves into blazing fury by studying their history, and are ready to refuse votes to Irishmen because their fathers passed a confiscating act, and delight in Dutch defeats before Acheen because of the massacre of Amboyna. It is just the same about evidence. An Englishman believes a man a fool who is always worrying himself about things his adversary says, who listens to every morsel of tittle-tattle about epigrams against him which his adversary has made, or who greedily receives stories of insults offered by the enemy's hangers-on to his servants. He quotes all manner of proverbs about listeners, asks how society is to go on if everybody “repeats,” and is positively angry if malicious gossip is traced to inferior servants. If, however, the enemy is a nation, all these rules are discarded. It is absurd to believe that John contemplates stealing your cabbages, particularly as, if the gout were away, you could kick John off the premises, but to
