enough to reveal the entire significance of the crisis, nor were the
political standards proper for measuring the whole of the expediencies
hanging in the balance. The conflict could not be adequately gauged by
such questions as whether the Slave States had or had not a
constitutional right to establish an independent government; whether the
Free States were animated by philanthropy or by love of empire; whether
it was to the political advantage of England that the American Union
should be divided and consequently weakened. Such questions were not
necessarily improper in themselves, and we can imagine circumstances in
which they might be not only proper but decisive. But, the
circumstances being what they were, the narrower expediencies of
ordinary politics were outweighed by one of those supreme and
indefeasible expediencies which are classified as moral. These are, in
other words, the higher, wider, more binding, and transcendent part of
the master art of social wellbeing.

Here was only one illustration of the growing tendency to substitute the
narrowest political point of view for all the other ways of regarding
the course of human affairs, and to raise the limitations which
practical exigencies may happen to set to the application of general
principles, into the very place of the principles themselves. Nor is the
process of deteriorating conviction confined to the greater or noisier
transactions of nations. It is impossible that it should be so. That
process is due to causes which affect the mental temper an a whole, and
pour round us an atmosphere that enervates our judgment from end to end,
not more in politics than in morality, and not more in morality than in
philosophy, in art, and in religion. Perhaps this tendency never showed
itself more offensively than when the most important newspaper in the
country criticised our great naturalist's scientific speculations as to
the descent of man, from the point of view of property, intelligence,