I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but it would
have been enough to have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" of
sensation. For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned
from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations
have been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this,--that
their feelings are constant and just, results of due contemplation,
and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its
feelings may be--usually are--on the whole, generous and right; but
it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or
tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for
the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing
so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is
on;--nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is
past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just,
measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not
spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing
evidence of a single ruffian's having done a single murder; and for
a couple of years see its own children murder each other by their
thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only what the
effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring no wise to
determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a
great nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six
walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of
thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings,
to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have no
control," with a "by your leave;" and large landed estates to be
bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers
up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and
altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common