to give him his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Romans really
were, and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering an
important service to mankind.

When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt another in consequence, he can
always regard himself as the civil arm of a spiritual power, and all the
more easily because there is real need to assert the righteous efficacy
of indignation. I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should object
all the more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with salt, if
the administrator of such torture alleged as a motive his care for Truth
and posterity, and got himself pictured with a halo in consequence. In
transactions between fellow-men it is well to consider a little, in the
first place, what is fair and kind towards the person immediately
concerned, before we spit and roast him on behalf of the next century
but one. Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of
the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that
touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow
and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the
divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but
to learn what it is they thus summon us to do, we have to consider the
mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own
appetites. I cannot feel sure how my voting will affect the condition of
Central Asia in the coming ages, but I have good reason to believe that
the future populations there will be none the worse off because I
abstain from conjectural vilification of my opponents during the present
parliamentary session, and I am very sure that I shall be less injurious
to my contemporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority of
instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of
the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A
sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does