people were happier, they would be better. When you see a poor cabman
on a winter-day, soaked with rain, and fevered with gin, violently
thrashing the wretched horse he is driving, and perhaps howling at it,
you may be sure that it is just because the poor cabman is so miserable
that he is doing all that. It was a sudden glimpse, perhaps, of his bare
home and hungry children, and of the dreary future which lay before
himself and them, that was the true cause of those two or three furious
lashes you saw him deal upon the unhappy screw's ribs. Whenever I read
any article in a review, which is manifestly malignant, and intended not
to improve an author, but to give him pain, I cannot help immediately
wondering what may have been the matter with the man who wrote the
malignant article. Something must have been making him very unhappy,
I think. I do not allude to playful attacks upon a man, made in pure
thoughtlessness and buoyancy of spirit,--but to attacks which indicate a
settled, deliberate, calculating rancor. Never be angry with the man who
makes such an attack; you ought to be sorry for him. It is out of great
misery that malignity for the most part proceeds. To give the ordinary
mortal a fair chance, let him be reasonably successful and happy. Do not
worry a man into nervous irritability, and he will be amiable. Do not
dip a man in water, and he will not be wet.

Of course, my friend, I know who is to you the most interesting of all
beings, and whose history is the most interesting of all histories.
_You_ are to yourself the centre of this world, and of all the interests
of this world. And this is quite right.

There is no selfishness about all this, except that selfishness which
forms an essential element in personality,--that selfishness which must
go with the fact of one's having a self. You cannot help looking at all
things as they appear from your own point of view; and things press