A minor event, which now looks much less important than it did not many
years ago, but which still had real influence in deteriorating moral
judgment, was the career of a late sovereign of France. Some apparent
advantages followed for a season from a rule which had its origin in a
violent and perfidious usurpation, and which was upheld by all the arts
of moral corruption, political enervation, and military repression. The
advantages lasted long enough to create in this country a steady and
powerful opinion that Napoleon the Third's early crime was redeemed by
the seeming prosperity which followed. The shocking prematureness of
this shallow condonation is now too glaringly visible for any one to
deny it. Not often in history has the great truth that 'morality is the
nature of things' received corroboration so prompt and timely. We need
not commit ourselves to the optimistic or sentimental hypothesis that
wickedness always fares ill in the world, or on the other hand that
whoso hearkens diligently to the divine voice, and observes all the
commandments to do them, shall be blessed in his basket and his store
and all the work of his hand. The claims of morality to our allegiance,
so far as its precepts are solidly established, rest on the same
positive base as our faith in the truth of physical laws. Moral
principles, when they are true, are at bottom only registered
generalisations from experience. They record certain uniformities of
antecedence and consequence in the region of human conduct Want of faith
in the persistency of these uniformities is only a little less fatuous
in the moral order than a corresponding want of faith would instantly
disclose itself to be in the purely physical order. In both orders alike
there is only too much of this kind of fatuousness, this readiness to
believe that for once in our favour the stream shall flow up hill, that
we may live in miasmatic air unpoisoned, that a government may depress
the energy, the self-reliance, the public spirit of its citizens, and