frequently to do harm instead of good: but the present question is
whether we can, with safety and effect, be wholly emancipated from them?
Whether we should shake them off at pleasure and without mercy, as the
only bar to the triumph of truth and justice? Or whether benevolence,
constructed upon a logical scale, would not be merely _nominal_, whether
duty, raised to too lofty a pitch of refinement, might not sink into
callous indifference or hollow selfishness? Again, is it not to exact
too high a strain from humanity, to ask us to qualify the degree
of abhorrence we feel against a murderer by taking into our cool
consideration the pleasure he may have in committing the deed, and in
the prospect of gratifying his avarice or his revenge? We are hardly so
formed as to sympathise at the same moment with the assassin and
his victim. The degree of pleasure the former may feel, instead of
extenuating, aggravates his guilt, and shews the depth of his malignity.
Now the mind revolts against this by mere natural antipathy, if it is
itself well-disposed; or the slow process of reason would afford but a
feeble resistance to violence and wrong. The will, which is necessary to
give consistency and promptness to our good intentions, cannot extend so
much candour and courtesy to the antagonist principle of evil: virtue,
to be sincere and practical, cannot be divested entirely of the
blindness and impetuosity of passion! It has been made a plea (half
jest, half earnest) for the horrors of war, that they promote trade
and manufactures. It has been said, as a set-off for the atrocities
practised upon the negro slaves in the West Indies, that without their
blood and sweat, so many millions of people could not have sugar to
sweeten their tea. Fires and murders have been argued to be beneficial,
as they serve to fill the newspapers, and for a subject to talk of--
this is a sort of sophistry that it might be difficult to disprove on
the bare scheme of contingent utility; but on the ground that we have
stated, it must pass for a mere irony. What the proportion between the