No one but a very stupid person would, if it were fairly put to him,
maintain that this extreme disapprobation was right: but it cannot
be denied that this is the direction to which all human beings are
likely, at first, to feel an impulse to go. A man does you some
injury: you are much angrier than if he had done the like injury
to some one else. You are much angrier when your own servants are
guilty of little neglects and follies, than when the servants of
your next neighbour are guilty in a precisely similar degree. The
Prime Minister (or Chancellor) fails to make you a Queen's Counsel
or a Judge: you are much more angry than if he had overlooked
some other man, of precisely equal merit. And I do not mean merely
that the injury done to yourself comes more home to you, but that
positively you think it a worse thing. It seems as if there were
more of moral evil in it. The boy who steals your plums seems worse
than other boys stealing other plums. The servant who sells your
oats and starves your horses, seems worse than other servants who
do the like. It is not merely that you feel where the shoe pinches
yourself, more than where it pinches another: that is all quite
right. It is that you have a tendency to think it is a worse shoe
than another which gives an exactly equal amount of pain. You are
prone to dwell upon and brood over the misconduct which affected
yourself.

Well, you begin to see that this is unworthy, that selfishness and
mortified conceit are at the foundation of it. You determine that
you will shake yourself free from this vulgar error. What more
magnanimous, you think, than to do the opposite of the wrong thing?
Surely it will be generous, and even heroic, to wholly acquit
the wrong-doer, and even to cherish him for a bosom friend. So
the pendulum swings over to the opposite extreme, and you land in